Thanks to the fabulous wayback machine, I have imported my blog from between 1999 and 2006. It's not properly formatted and most of the images are missing, but it's somewhat interesting to read the things my younger self wrote about 15 years ago.
I have pondered a long time whether to learn web programming for my customers' services app, so that they can access their user & device statistics, crash logs, manage service messages, push messages, etc.
I now have decided not to pursue this path. Web technology is a mess, even more than mobile technology. It's lacking a clear separation of layers and although many frameworks nowadays are using MVC or similar patterns, I feel I have to do too many things at once (web service, html templating, css design, java script for interactive stuff, etc.) to really make a professional web app.
I'm going to make a mobile client instead, using the technologies I already have mastered and in which I'm productive. Yes, I still want to learn something new, that's why I'm working with a NoSQL database now for the first time.
Of course the downside is my customers can no longer use their web browsers to manage all that, but since they have their iPhones and iPads always around anyways, I'm sure they can cope with that.
After 6 years being co-director and CTO of LaTe App-Developers, I feel it is time to make some changes.
It's not that mobile development is no longer interesting to me, however after doing (too) many small (5-20 person days) iOS projects, I need some new challenges. Project work has been limiting my creativity and enforcing too much regularity in my daily routine. Besides, there's hardly any room to do compelling software architecture work in projects of said size. You're rather constantly working against the time in order to make some profit with those fixed-price projects.
This year I took three months off in order to decide on what to do next and finally, I have made up my mind. As per the end of this year, I'm resigning as co-director and CTO of LaTe. I will still be involved as freelance collaborator though in order to continue supporting our biggest client.
With the regained freedom, I plan to explore some new directions with regards to own apps and services. I need to catch up with what happened in (Embedded)-Linux and I also want to polish my almost rusty Python and Vala skills.
Last but not least, I'm not going to do 40 hours per week any more – instead I want to spend more time with my family.
Every 6 years or so I'm revamping my website. This is the 3rd incarnation now (yes, I started early) featuring a new wordpress theme, a clean layout, and – most important – serious content improvements.
So 2013 is finally over and it's been an energy-sapping year, business-, baby-, and building wise.
Business. The stagnation that was present for pretty much the first half of the year and which forced us to downsize a bit, had been replaced by too many projects all at once in the 2nd half of the year. And while it was welcome since it saved us from closing doors, it prevented working on our private projects, i.e. our apps in the store, but also personal pet projects – let alone anything open source.
Baby. After 7 horrible months between Lara Marie's 5th and 13th month, she finally began sleeping great, often 12 hours without waking up. She's now 2.5 years and everything is good. Still, she's a demanding little one, enjoying being offered a selection of everything instead of deciding on her behalf. I love her.
Building. With a bit of (natural) delay, our new house was finished by November and we did move on 9th of December. We're now 2 months in here and it's feeling mostly great. We had to monitor and decide on a LOT of things during the construction phase, but apart from the usual minor issues, the building quality is good and we enjoy the comfort of having a dedicated room for Lara Marie. Being able to use the living room again after 20:00 is nice :)
I took the liberty to install a dedicated server for the house which is living in a 19" rack in the utility room. I'm going to post about the networking infrastructure soon.
Referring to my last post, I'm still planning on doing the sabbatical, but due to some unforeseeable circumstances with my wife's health, it had to be postponed for a bit. It's going to happen in 2014 though, which is why I'm sure, 2014 is going to be better than 2013.
Salut!
I didn't blog for quite a while, since – as I've mentioned before – these days, Facebook seems to me the more appropriate forum for shorter status messages.
That aside, let me recap how things are these days. Since the birth of Lara Marie, quite a lot in my life has changed. I haven't been contributing to any open source projects nor did I have time to continue my writing of articles and books. This leaves me being quite unsatisfied.
Business-wise, my iOS/Android-company had to struggle a bit in late 2012, since a lot of clients cancelled or postponed their app projects due to the unstable economy in europe. Thankfully we're now being more busy again, however I find myself being pretty annoyed with how our projects are being performed these days. Dealing with customers who try to squeeze more and more features into an app and loading you with change requests while at the same time insisting on the fixed price offer is extremly annoying. Plus the pure nature of many mini-projects we get (typically one or two person weeks) where the communication overhead results in us working twice the amount of time we actually get paid for.
Perhaps we need to be more strict and organize the workflow better. On the other hand, it rather looks like the mobile app market is dominated by so-called "full service design agencies" which then outsource the actual implementation to us, keeping us out of the actual decisions, but paying us only a minimal share of what they get.
In a world of HTML5 and cross-platform-tools ruining the prices, it also seems increasingly difficult to convey the benefits of a highly device-optimized native app.
With 30 years of experience in information technology (heck, I even received a Ph.D ;) – do I really still need to discuss about button placements and whether billing a bunch of additional hours is justified, when all I did was implementing "that trivial feature"?
After five years of iOS development, it might be the time for me to move to something new – or come back to old things. That's why I'm pondering about a combination of a sabbatical and a parental leave in 2014.
Hi folks!
Obviously I don't manage to update this blog more than a few times a year. I must confess that – for smaller status messages – I find Facebook and Twitter working quite well. So if you want to stay in touch a bit more, hop over to my page @ Michael Lauer or follow my Tweets @ DrMickeyLauer.
The biggest tasks this year was getting Lara Marie to sleep well and buying a house, both which we finished successfully. Right now we have a hole in the ground, but it's supposed to be finished by October 2013. I'm going to report about the progress now and then.
FOSS-wise I didn't manage to do anything meaningful more than visiting FOSDEM and the OHSW this year. I tried to catch up with what's happening in FSO, Vala, and OpenEmbedded though. Since I do no longer use OE on a frequent basis, I decided to not run for re-election as OE board member, thus also resigning from being OE e.V. president. I'm quite happy to hand the paperwork over to someone else ;)
With Lara Marie growing older (she's now 18 months), I enjoy being a father more and more. While mommy was #1 in the first year, it becomes apparent that I'm #1 in the 2nd year, helping the little one to form her individuality and her will.
Company-wise 2012 was a bit of a ride as due to the economy some of our biggest clients postponed their app updates and we struggled a bit getting enough contracts to keep the four of us busy. Then again, we worked on our own apps in the free time and I'm happy to announce the next major version of Volksradio / Just Radio, which is going to ship soon.
I wish all of you a merry 2013!
Yours, Mickey!
After having skipped FOSDEM in 2011, I wanted to go this year, especially because of the Golden Delicious stand where we had the OpenPhoenux GTA04 on show. A lot of people came around and were excited that someone picked up where Openmoko had left in 2009. The GTA04 is the true successor of the FreeRunner and I strongly invite all of you to support this movement by buying one. You will not get a more open mobile phone anywhere else.
I know that Brussels is always a bit colder than Frankfurt, so I tend to carry appropriate clothing... what I didn't expect though was that it was frickin' -20 on saturday. I have never been freezing more in my life. Lets cross fingers that I won't come back home with a cold. Especially due to the crazy public transportation situation. The Deutsche Bahn managed to accumulate a one hour delay on my way to Brussels – that's ok, however they managed to crash the engine in Aachen on my way back. So badly that we had to switch to a regional train and switch again in Cologne. Man... *sigh*
On to some good news... another thing I didn't expect was kind of an Openmoko family reunion. It was amazing to find Jan Lübbe, Stefan Schmidt, Daniel Willmann, Harald Welte, and even Rasterman hanging around at FOSDEM. That was just great. I also happened to share my hotelroom with Boudewijn which was unexpected but again very cool.
So despite the freezing, it was a great FOSDEM for me and I'm looking forward to go again next year, perhaps bringing Sabine and Lara Marie as well.
Information Technology has seen a really crazy year. Among all the smaller incidents, the big bangs involved Nokia partnering with Microsoft, abandoning Maemo, HP driving with WebOS against the wall, patent lawsuits everywhere.
What that means for FOSS-lovers is clear... you can't trust any company to continue working on anything. Business demands are what counts in the world of mass markets. If you want longterm support for a platform, your best bet is to build a community around it. But you will also want to work on hardware support otherwise you'll run into the next dead end.
To be honest, right now I don't see much of a future for any mobile Linux-inspired platform other than the mutation called Android. But that's not much of a problem per se. The smartphone market is crazy. To compete in that world, you have to give up on freedom. But is the mass market really what we want? Is it what mobile Linux needs?
I don't think so. There are still huge opportunities for using Linux-based mobile software platforms in niches such as machine2machine communication, home automation, research, teaching, and more. That's where a service-based middleware like FSO comes into the game: for special interests. However, even niche-adoption is hindered without a minimal set of applications. And that is where we still lack: Even special interest people want to use their smartphones to manage contacts, browse the web, send mails, play media, etc. We don't have an integrated software stack with a complete set of UI applications that would cover these needs. Openmoko worked on one, but failed. Nokia worked on multiple ones, but gave up (multiple times). What else do we have?
With HP's recent announcement about releasing WebOS as open source, the game may have changed. If we could use the WebOS application stack on top of the FSO middleware, we may have a real chance to get something great and usable – and complete – soon. I have always liked the WebOS UI. If it's a bit slower than other UIs, who cares as long as it is free?
Tempus fugit. I can tell you. Even more so, if you have a baby. I must confess I somewhat underestimated the impact the baby would have on my spare time. In some weird mindset I really thought I could continue working as usual on my open source projects... as we know now I couldn't. I completely lost track and have to catch up with all changes that happened over the last 6 months.
The first bunch of weeks with the baby were really demanding. I mean, really. She screamed a lot and could only sleep in our arms. Boy, were we tired. We carried her around so much we have Schwarzenegger arms now. But it's great to see her developing, err... growing up, of course. With 6 months now she is a very interested baby, eager to learn new things and always trying to become more mobile.
Luckily both my wife and me are self-employed. It so much easier when you can skip some hours at the usual start of the workday and also at the usual end. Of course, the work needs to be done, so we have to compensate when she's in bed. But still, it's very satisfying being able to see her twice a day for a couple of hours -- not all families have this luxury. Plus the existence of our two invaluable grandmas... it's great.
Company-wise, the Lauer & Teuber GbR had an amazing year with many interesting iOS (and some Android) projects. We have reached the maximum we can do with the two guys we are, so we decided to grow and hire our first regular employee who's going to start in 2012. We also rented another office and are already moving.
I'm slowly getting back into some of my beloved open source projects... it's great that work on e.g. FSO did not stall at all, but continued while I was "away". Last week, I attended the 3rd installment of the Open Hard- and Software Workshop in munich, where the latest development of the very promising GTA04 mobile phone was presented. I had a talk about Vala which was well received. By the way, my Vala-book plans are not dead yet... just in parking position :)
Next week I'm attending the FSOSHRCON, a joined conference with the people working on the freesmartphone.org middleware and the SHR software. It's going to be great seeing all the folks again, concentrating a full weekend to agree on some important issues laying the path forward for the next year. Can't wait to be there.
What's left is the feeling that an extremely busy year has passed by, spiced with incredibly intense emotions. I'm a happy man and I love my life. I'm given exciting opportunities, but also challenges – and I plan to accept everything :)
All the best to you guys!