I’ve been neglecting this blog for much of the (now) past year. So it may not seem like it, but 2013 was eventful year for me…

Home office

End of december 2012 I left my job as senior developer and project manager and in january formed my own company. Mid january I started work for a new client which more or less defined my development focus for the rest of the year as well as continue into 2014. It was a big step into my dream of working at home full time. I arranged threadmill desk. It was immediate click after I read about the idea couple of years back. I’m not overly strict with it, and may decide to work elsewhere (warmer months see me on balcony a lot :). In general I find it increases my concentration. If nothing else, it feels much better than sitting day after day. I started walking with slow ~2 km/h speed according to recommendations on various blogs. But after a while I started experimenting and am currently using 4 km/h. It suits me better, I feel more focused this way too. On a typical working day I jot around 8-16km.

Startupizer

Startupizer saw two big releases in 2013. It started the year (or more accurately, it ended 2012) with an obstacle though: when sending 2.2 version for Mac App Store review, it was rejected due to sandboxing issues. As I wrote at the time, I had no choice but to move it. As of now, the old 2.1 version is still available on MAS and customers can continue to purchase it there. Upgrade to direct download version is of course free of charge; in fact, I recommend the upgrade to everyone due to many fixes and improvements! In december, I released 2.3, which brings many interesting features. It was soon followed with bugfix release 2.3.1. See review notes for details. Startupizer received fair attention from media too, one of the highlights was definitely the article by MacWorld as part of their Mac Gems series back in june. I’ll continue iterating on it in 2014, although have no concrete plans for the moment being.

appledoc

As a consequence of my client work my time on other projects was very limited. appledoc took hardest hit as I practically stopped all development except for couple of bug fixes. There were couple of nice contributions though, bringing in some much anticipated features! And of course big thanks to all contributors - appledoc would not be where it is now without you guys! Things should improve in 2014 though; I’m bringing in another developer to help me bring the project forward! While there are many pressing issues with current release, I feel it’s more important to focus on improving stability and finish what I started as part of next major release. It’s going to take longer, but I see it as up-front investment for long-term ability to adapt and bring new features. Current codebase has become fragile with time with all the additions. Coupled with very crude unit tests, it’s very hard to even maintain it, not to mention bringing in new features without regressions. It was a lesson learned in how to manage popular open source project. With new version, unit tests coverage is much better and passing tests will be one of the requirement for accepting pull requests. I hope I can report nice progress throughout the year.

In the end

As mentioned, 2013 was year of big changes. It was a start of a new chapter and I’m looking forward into what 2014 will bring! And as for you, my dear reader, I wish you all the best in 2014!