Code Unreachable

I recently had the need to add a TrimBox and BleedBox to an existing PDF. The proposed solution using Ghostscript in Stack Overflow wasn't working for me. 

I created a small utility called pdfboxer to do this and it uses Apache PDFBox underneath. You can download the source from https://github.com/nicknux/pdfboxer.

It allows you to change the TrimBox, ArtBox, BleedBox, and CropBox.

Sample usage for the utility is:

Earlier this month, I was learning Scala but I also want to try Go (http://golang.org). I ported ScalaRovi into Go, the result is Gorovi - A Simple Rovi API Client Library for Go. Check it out https://github.com/nicknux/gorovi

During the holiday break, I wanted to learn Scala. As a learning project, I created a client library for the Rovi API (http://developer.rovicorp.com). Check it out https://github.com/nicknux/scalarovi

Last week I completed the “Public Album” feature in Albumium. I had deployed the new changes while I was in San Francisco. While I was there, I also took a lot of pictures and those can now be found in the first Albumium Public Album -- http://bit.ly/1IPc4sv.

The Public Albums feature allows other people to share their photos by requesting to be invited into the album. For instance, other San Francisco tourists could post their photos into my San Francisco album.

Development for Albumium officially started on October 22, 2014. That’s when I created my project in Rally and planned out my sprints.

A couple of weeks before that I was thinking of projects to do to help me in learning the Ruby and AngularJS technology stack (I came from a .NET, Java, and Windows background).

I was in the middle of finishing a Java-based project, which, like Albumium, also interfaces with Google+ Photos, Flickr, and OneDrive.  I though that I could abandon that project, re-imagine it, and also re-write the re-useable portions of it in Ruby and AngularJS.

My plan involved 11 sprints which ends in the middle of March 2015. The goal is at the end of 11 sprints I will have all the core features of Albumium completed. Essentially my MVP.

I have to say, shipping the MVP was successful given that I had delivered what I had set out to do in time. I’m extremely proud of what I had accomplished since I’ve done a lot in a short amount of time. “Short” since I have to work on this only at nights and weekends. Plus, I have to work around my personal life and my full-time job.

In the end, I had not only delivered a fully working MVP, but I also came out a better Software Engineer. I’ve touched upon the entire stack of this product including the systems engineering aspects of it. I now know more than what I used to 5 or 6 months ago.

But of course, the MVP is not the end. I have User Stories left in the backlog and I’m working on them now. The list includes:

Integration with Twitter

Integration with Dropbox

Integration with OneDrive

Native apps for iOS and Android

Photo Annotations

Commenting

More Privacy and Permission Options (including enabling Public views)

Geotagging

etc.

These ones will be delivered as they are completed and you’ll see them come up as new features on the site. Unlike the MVP, which is the first initial push to get out a working product out the door, these next User Stores will be delivered more iteratively.

And yes, I’m still the only working on this.

Today I launched my side project Albumium (http://www.albumium.com)

It lets you create private Shared Albums from multiple Photo Services. Use photos from Facebook, Flickr, Google+, or Instagram. You can invite your friends and family to a Shared Album and let them put their own photos too.

One of the features that I really like is called “Share Request.” When your friends share their photos to your album, those photos are not automatically added, but Share Requests are created for each of those photos. As the owner of the album, you have the choice of approving or rejecting the Share Requests. This was inspired by the concept of Pull Requests on GitHub, where the maintainer could accept or reject a Pull Request, which preserves the quality of the open source project.

In my previous post, I mentioned about learning Ruby and other technologies surrounding it. This is because I'm building a product from scratch for a well established American brand. They have previous products built around RoR and I want to continue building new things using the Ruby stack, plus, I really want to move away from the Microsoft stack.

As always, I have a side project to augment my learning and becoming better up to the point where I can say that I'm an expert. My work week is like: 10-12 hours of full-time work; 3-5 hours of side project work. Weekends vary widely... it's between 3-8 hours of side project work. I've factored in some time for catching up on TV shows, video gaming, and family.

I saw this post on Readwrite yesterday http://readwrite.com/2013/05/01/10-technology-skills-no-longer-in-demand and it actually made me think about how I've been upgrading my skill-set recently.

For the past four months, I've been learning Ruby, Rails, and its ecosystem. I won't call myself an expert yet but I have made very good progress. I now feel comfortable navigating existing Ruby codebases and also starting something from scratch. I find myself not going for the reference books as frequently as I used to anymore.

Things I've learned so far:

Ruby 1.9+

Rails 4

Sinatra

Rspec

AngularJS

Redis

From a DevOps or Sytems Engineering perspective, I've also learned:

Capistrano v3

Nginx

Unicorn

I've used Git and MongoDB before so those aren't new, but I've been using them more now.

I created a skeleton for my AngularJS app that served by SInatra. You can find it here -- https://github.com/nicknux/sinatra-angular-tmpl/graphs/traffic.

This was inspired by two resources I used when I was learning AngularJS:

Style Guide by Minko Gechev (https://github.com/mgechev/angularjs-style-guide)

Earlier this year, I was playing around with Google AppEngine with a project that has something to do with interfacing with different Photo Services (e.g., Flickr, Picasa, OneDrive).

Wow it's been a while since I created this blog and the first post. A lot has happened to my Software Engineering career since then and it would have been nice if I've captured some key thoughts and moments in this blog.

Those thoughts might not interest anyone but would have been valuable for me to look back on. Would have been interesting to see if certain opinions I've had or design choices I've made were stupid or hilarious on hindsight.

I have always written enterprise applications in the jobs that I've held. In my free time, I like trying out new things and programming on other languages other than what I use I at work, which is C#.

I have written iOS apps before and they are mostly utilities or apps that integrate with Web APIs of other platforms like Facebook.

In the past, I have also tried to write a social networking site called Shmapr... which I later changed to become an iPad app that streams real-time data from Twitter and Instagram. Earlier this year, I chose to kill Shmapr because it didn't get the traction I was hoping for. During that time, I started working on something else -- I was writing a game for the iPhone and iPad.

I was lucky enough to be invited to write for OmNom Apps, an independent game publisher with a good portfolio of previously published games.

The game is called Spy Words. The objective of the game is to decode and decipher cryptograms. There are multiple puzzle packs to choose from and hints are available to use if you get stuck.

The game was made for iPhone, iPad, and iPhone 5, so naturally written in Objective-C. I have used Cocos2d as the game framework, and although I have not written a game before or used Cocos2d in the past, I found it easy to learn and pretty straightforward.

Writing the core puzzle engine was easy. The hard part was getting the user experience right; to make the game fun but still challenging. In the end, I think the game turned out very fun to play.