So I started this in January and then got completely swept up in the year. Let’s try and get on track to blog more in the last quarter. I was doing pretty well through January and February but March got bogged down and the blog got blasted to other things.

Recently I’ve been working on a few small projects to try and get some technical time in.

Android App

I built a simple proof of concept Android App for a project Thinkering was looking to get started on. It took advantage of the Google Location services to track the user and then would submit that data as JSON to a server.

iOS App

Trying to get some Swift practice in I wrote a simple app to take advantage of the NIST data set. This was really more Swift/iOS practice than an attempt to get something serious don.

AWS Infrastructure

We use AWS for a bunch of hosting at work, but I wanted to try and play with some of the new features. I tried out using AWS Lambda and the API gateway to host a bot for HipChat. Ran into problems where the Hipchat webhooks would not talk to the Gateway server. Without any detailed logs from HipChat, that fell off the table. Instead I ended up using

Go

I’ve been hearing good things of Go of late, so wanted to give it a try. Nothing fancy, just started with some sample code provided by the kind folks at Atlassian. Wrote a simple HipChat bot that works with Jenkins to deploy code in our environment. Still tweaking the scripts a bit, but looks like it could work.

As an aside I decided to try and it make it easily managed and installable. I went old school and built a .deb file for the bot. It installed nicely. I may need to try this combination again sometime soon.

I’m having fun with bots at the moment so I plan to write a few more and see what I can do to make them both more useful and interesting.