The Rapid Prototyping Toolkit for Mobile Apps

I am working on a set of tools to help mobile developers to quickly prototype apps. The platform will consist of an online dashboard for editing and publishing prototypes, a mobile app for running the prototypes and an emulator for testing prototypes before publishing. The mobile app will initially be available for android only. The platform will communicate with 3rd party apps via a HTTP REST, with JSON formatted data. Developers will be able to develop their prototypes in their language of choice provided they host behind an HTTP server.

Happy Birthday President Moi

Wishing a happy birthday to our former president, Daniel Torotich Arap Moi. Yesterday he turned 90. We share a birthday and that is why he is the only politician I always remember to wish a 'happy birthday'.

I am so grateful to Moi, he kept the peace at the expense of a few individuals, my view is, overall, it was better for everyone. It's time he wrote a book exposing all, he is 90, we will let him walk. I give his presidency a B+ for the peace, we could have been Rwanda, DRC or Somalia (No offense guys) had he missed a step.

Kibaki on the other hand, resurrected the economy, created infrastructure, reduced our dependency on donors at the expense of even more widespread corruption. He gets a B-, for letting people die in 2007.

Now its up to you Mr Uhuruto, My prediction, these guys will score a A-, mainly because 2 heads are better than 1 and also because of the pressure they are facing from all directions (ICC, Referendum, Impossible promises i.e laptops) and the economic vision set by Kibaki which we must try to live up to.

Kenya is going to be an African super power if we stay on track, mend fences with the west and negotiate better terms with the East. Its time Kenya corrected the imbalance of payments.

Generating Git Stats By Author

Ever wonder how many contributors your git-versioned project has, and how much each of them has contributed to the project. If yes, then here is a simple solution for you. It is based on the git blame command. Observe the section that contains the file extensions, you can customize that to ignore some file extensions.

git ls-tree --name-only -z -r HEAD|egrep -z -Z -E '\.(php|py|html)$'   |xargs -0 -n1 git blame --line-porcelain|grep "^author "|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr

Its not ussually entirely accurate. e.g if a coder adds an if .. else block to enclose existing code, formatting shifts the whole block right by a tab/space and git attributes the authorship of the whole block to this author. Another example is an coder who uses a lot of external libraries and git assumes he is the author.

Nevertheless, its a nice trick to know.

New Stuff Coming Up Soon

The year 2014 has been great, my focus has remained on Mobile solutions i.e SMS, USSD and Mobile Web. Integration solutions have also interested me a lot especially when it comes to interfacing 2 or more systems without relying on a defined API (when there is none). This automates tasks that have been previously manually done improving efficiency and cutting costs (and some jobs) there by improving productivity.

I have got a lot of exciting stuff coming out soon and am looking forward to writing more about it here once its ready, tested and deployed.

IT'S Been Long

It's been long, but I promise I will be back in 2014. For the time been, take note that I have added a link to my other almost abandoned non-tech blog 'Tuwakenya' (added as 'Kenya Today'). This one is shared and anybody can post on it, all you need is a Google Account, and in fact some of the articles were authored by my friends. I coded it from scratch back in 2011 when I was experimenting the App Engine platform, which was the same time I was doing my 4th year project on the same platform (http://smszangu.appspot.com).

App Engine turned out to be a great platform and the whole of 2012 and 2013 I have been coding almost exclusive on the platform. I especially loved the powerful APIs availed, that are easy to integrate into the application. My Favourite APIs are Memcache Taskqueues and Full Text Search.

Recently I have started exploring other platforms because App Engine, like all other platform still has its weaknesses but I have no plans abandoning it. I will be playing around with Amazon EC2 a lot in the coming days, I already have some apps running the and I am loving it. Unlike Google Appengine, on EC2 I am able to fire up machines running my favourite OS and configured to my tastes. I am able to experiment with other alternatives of what App Engine offers. E.g Lucene Solr for full text search and Celery/Rabbitmq for Task Queues. I will hopefully be writing a lot about my findings.

Lets see how 2014 shall be!! BYE and Wishing you all a happy new year.