Personal Development - Part Two

This was actually pretty easy, I want to start spinning up a less technology focused life and spending time on sustainable living. Gardening is an excellent way to focus on local sustainability. If I want to expand beyond locally beneficial behaviors I could probably aim for travel via backpacking. Trying to sell that to my family made me notice that sustainability has a lot in common with personal discomfort.

Growing up in a Calvinist family the backpacking aspect sounds more interesting, but gardening is more likely to achieve familiar bliss. I decided to branch out into raised bed and vertical gardening. It will also allow me to reduce my mechanical footprint in the barn. Having four vehicles under cover has reduced my footprint for toys in the barn. I can no longer get to my workbench without moving a car.

So I can spend up to five hundred dollars on alternative gardening this year. My long term goal is turn this into a teaching experience for some of the kids that are living in the subdivisions that keep sprouting up around the Harrison, Ohio area. I already have the tools, just need to obtains material and seeds this year.

I have been working on server-side development for over fifteen years. I am now part of team that is providing a phone based application and have not looked at mobile development in seven years. I believe that content should be delivered using the browser, I also accept that there is good money to be made in creating bespoke applications for walled gardens.

Apple Macintosh and iPhone applications have been money magnets for many years. I have always discounted their development environment. The company has spent so much time on gilding the lily and creating barriers to entry that I really cannot embrace their platforms on principle.

Android development is slightly better. I would have adopted it sooner if it had more than Google behind its development. In a some ways it reminds me of developing for the Macintosh a few decades ago. Kotlin is much easier than Objective-C but shares many of the same self centered delusions. Dalvik was a nod to platform independence, to be followed by native applications in the Android framework. I think all of the effort that Apple and Goggle spent on custom environments would have better served the world if they improved their web browsing experience.

Given that I have limited hours in my day, around sixteen, eight of which are spent earning a salary, eight sleeping. and hopefully another eight on making the world a better place for my predecessors, I have to choose carefully what I want to engage with in professional pursuits. This year it will be Android development.

Swift looks like a good language, however, the iOS stack still demands that code be written in Objective-C for older devices. I spent time with that stack when I was supporting NeXT applications. Better to choose the new devil than the one I have despised for more than twenty years. Andriod and Kotin seem to be the gentler master for now.