So it’s over. I thought that a nice way of finishing the series of posts related to the contest would be some information about my work during the past two and a half months. So, let’s begin.
I published 26 posts (counting this one). (I wrote a tiny bit more, but not everything found its way to the web.) I spent almost 12 hours writing and almost 18 hours coding (this includes frantically searching StackOverflow when things got out of hand). I used (of course) Org-mode to write posts and track time spent on Logeox. I used Beeminder as a stick to ensure I published (and coded) enough, though Logeox was not the only thing I hacked on during the contest. (Soon, I will revert to my usual, one-post-per-week-on-average schedule, which I have been maintaining steadily for almost two years now.) I had ambitious plans of tracking a few other contestants’ blogs, but life struck and I managed to track regularly only two or three of them; this I regret a lot. I hope to revisit more blogs soon – hopefully they won’t mysteriously vanish.
I consider my main goal – to learn a bit of Java and Android – accomplished. By no means am I a Java/Android expert now – not even remotely – but I dipped my toes in the technology, and I seem to be able to form some informed opinions now. (I still don’t like Java.) I gained some appreciation for a modern IDE, though I am aware that Emacs could do that (it can do a lot for JavaScript developers, for instance). OTOH, my gut feeling about the horrors of IDE’s UI seem to be confirmed: after years of using Emacs I’m astonished that Android Studio lacks a few obvious things (maybe I just didn’t find them – I didn’t really search a lot – but I’m afraid that e.g. quite a lot of text in AS is un-copyable, which is a terrible shame, especially when googling for help with errors/warnings shown in tooltips).
Enough ranting, though. There are still a few things I’d like to fix:
Fun fact: I accidentally deleted the whole project from my disk yesterday. Happily, there’s GitHub, but I don’t have time to install Android Studio again (and I had to do a complete system reinstall, together with hard drive partitioning). I have a habit of keeping all my files in a ~/works directory, and I backup it regularly, but AS’s default is somewhere else…
Anyway, if you made it so far (with reading, I mean), I invite you to stay! I’ll get back to blogging about Emacs and Elisp, of course, but it is quite possible that there will be a shift in my interests soon (hint: there were a few mentions of some other langauge, whose name is deceptively similar to a name of a different, popular language). Stay tuned!