The last month, or so, has been quite hectic, but now that we have finally settled in, in our new apartment, I have time to start on my next project(s). I have several things lined up, and hopefully I’m able to set aside enough time to complete each project within reasonably time. It’s worth mentioning that these are all personal projects, not projects done at my job.

I will tell you a little bit about each project, and naturally I will give updates during development. I have not prioritized this, but the projects I have planned is the following:

  1. A new cross-platform app
  2. A project involving IoT
  3. Increasing my skills as a developer The top priority now is none of the above. Before I go on to work on those, I need to finish the Android version of Parker Gratis. I am aiming to do that within a week’s time. After that, I plan to do some marketing for it, to increase the user volume.

On to the list above.

A new cross-platform app

This is an idea I’ve had a few years, however I have not done any work on it for several reasons. Now I feel I have the skillset needed, as well as the right tools to develop it. The app will be an informational app to find the nearest vet from where you are. This can come in handy in case you are on a vacation with your pets, and the pet gets ill or injured. I guess the biggest part of the job is to gather all the data needed, and as a start, I will only include Norwegian vets. The app itself should be simple, and intuitive to the user, and hopefully it won’t take that long to develop.

A project involving IoT

IoT illustration

IoT (Internet of Things) is a subject that have had my interest for a while. Seeing as I haven’t found any use for it, I haven’t worked with it though. Now that we have moved to a new apartment, I have seen an opportunity to use it for home automation. Our new apartment have been refurbished recently, and as a part of that, the previous owner installed wireless lights. My first thought was to use some sort of transmitter to control the lights by a webapp (or mobile app) in our local network, and from there new ideas came to my head.

For now I have the following list of stuff I want to automate:

  1. Monitor lights in all the rooms, to check whether or not they are on.
  2. Controlling the lights in the rooms where they are wireless.
  3. Humidity monitoring in the basement.
  4. Temperature monitoring in all rooms
  5. Monitoring the mailbox to check if we have mail or not.
  6. Monitor on the fridge, so we get warnings if the door has been open for a longer period of time. Laying around I have a starter kit from Particle, namely the Particle Core. I have been playing around with it lately to see its capabilities, and I believe I can do everything I want with it. So over the next months I will buy in equipment I need and work on this. It will be an exciting project, which will be a bit different than other projects I work on.

If you happen to have ideas to other parts I can automate in my home do share!

Increasing my skills as a developer

One can argue that I will be doing this by working on the projects, mentioned above, and I agree. I do however want to do some more specific to increase my skills. In particular I have started doing coding katas, which you can read more on at codekata.com. My goal by doing this is to become an even better problem solver. I aim to solve different katas in different ways, so I can see possible solutions to the same problem.

Are you doing code katas? Why/why not?