my programming journey

In April this year I started my beginner course in Android programming at Udacity. It was somehow bumpy experience. Especially because the course materials, the video tutorials in particular, were outdated (some were created in 2014 when the stand of Android was far in the past). Google/Udacity didn't bother to upgrade the course, but they allow people to enroll. Why was this an issue? Because along the way there were a lot incompatibility which created a lot issues in the Android Studio and Gradle system. Facing those issues as a beginner was not as simple as googling it. The tutors would say google the solution on stockoverflow. And as soon as you arrive there you are confronted by answers which are not for beginners in mind. The tutors were very quick in response, but they don't give you the answers, they just tell you to google and search stockoverflow (Hmmm... ). However the main challenge of the programme was that as soon as I graduated I found out Google had made...

GuNews v.2 The GuNews app was updated to version 2. No shiny features, but a few things were added to improve user experience. However the biggest improvement is the potential of data usage reduction. For that there is now an additional switch in the Settings. With it the user can opt out from showing the images in the news list and showing only text. Admittedly it's much more appealing to look at the headlines with relevant images, but that because I'm not concerned of my data usage. Even better I also implemented the Android paging library in the app, which means the app would only fetch necessary headlines. Initially only 10 headlines, which is needed to show on the list. And on the fly the app will fetch more as soon as the user scrolls down the list. The list of changes in this version: Added switch in the Settings for hiding images and tweaked Android paging (to reduce data usage) Code rewriting to adhere to one activity principle. Improved news search func...

Nias faces, Gunungsitoli 4 Dec 2013 (Private collection) One year ago I started working on the Nias keyboard. Along the way I learned that creating a dictionary is the first step. So I started my endeavour to create Nias dictionary that I could use for Android keyboard and for desktop PC. I managed to collect almost 10,000 words, which I compiled for Nias Keyboard module. However the work is still continuing to improve the dictionary. While working on collecting more words, I have started hunting for information about the spelling and grammar rules. So I have been working on hunspell package for Nias dictionary. The project progress can be seen on Nias Language Project repository on my github page. But I think I can't do this on my own, other Nias developers are needed. So I put everything on github at  https://github.com/sslaia/nias_language_project  for everyone to fork or to review and contribute. I hope to be able to find other Nias developers, who are passion...