my programming journey

St. George's Parish Church, Beckenham UK Note: The magnificent view of the St. George's above is yours if you sit in one of the cafes opposite. I know, it's become a trend recently that coders like going into a cafe to accomplish their work. And what is more delight than writing some codes while enjoying the wonderful sight of the St. George's Church above? Time is precious and limited. So it's high time to be more organised with the time for programming First of all, it's good to know that Googlers are heavily promoting Kotlin. So I think the best way forward is to switch to Kotlin. As a beginner I don't have the priviledge to master many languages in the same time. But then a friend of mine raised my attention to multi-platform language. One language to rule them all: Android, iOS, web, desktop. Hmmm.... Kotlin has been also trying to do exactly the same although it is still in early stages. Should I concentrate more on this and spend less ti...

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 Especially because the course materials, the video tutorials in particular, were outdated (some were created in 2014 when the stand of Android was far in the past).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...

GuNews app Finally I published my real first app, GuNews a news headlines app, in the Google Play. It was mainly an exercise in Android programming. And what an exercise! If you want to check it out, click here . I started my programming adventure by taking a nanodegree program in Android programming from Udacity+Google, which I finished in August 2019. When I finished that course I gained a bit self-confidence in Java for Android. However when I tried to rewrite the news app GuNews to follow the recommended Android Architecture Component (Android JetPack), simply AAC, I immediately faced challenges. First I realised that Google has moved on from Java to Kotlin when providing code examples for AAC. Grrrhhh.... I am a total beginner with only basic Java knowledge and must have to deal with a foreign language Kotlin. Second I found out that many solutions provided by diligent coders on stockoverflow are meant for the time before Android before AAC. So it was really a hu...

Nias Keyboard in action Nias Keyboard add-on app was my first ever Android code writing exercise. It's the Nias language pack for the AnySoftKeyboard. One thing I didn't realise when I started the project was that it would take me months working on the project. Writing the Android codes maybe involve a lot of trial and error. However the biggest challenge was actualy creating the language dictionary. It took me months to figure out how to do that. I needed to learn how to collect words by scrapping the web and searching my PC documents and how to create word frequency list, something that has nothing to do with Android at all. But it's worth the effort. I compared the word prediction accuracy of Nias language with that of Indonesian, and I was surprised. You would likely to get the right next word in Nias than in Indonesian! I even compared its word prediction accuracy with that of SwifKey's Nias language module. And again to my surprise Nias Keyboard got ...

Android Nanodegree Program Recently I started my Android Basics course offered by Udacity in cooperation with Google. This is a nanodegree program, so it's not something I can do only in my free time and on my own space. However I embrace this opportunity as I have been always dreaming of writing the apps I found missing in my previous working environment. So the call is real, but from my part it's for fun. Yes, I'm learning to write Android apps for fun and not for living. In short I'm excited to take on the challenge ahead.