Time to sum it up!

General feelings

Today I can definitely say I feel proud of myself Even though I could have made some of my posts published during the competition better. Even though I could have made my MoneyBack app developed during the project faaaaar more advanced.

I already wrote in the beginning of the competition, that for me neither completing the application nor becoming a perfect blogger with thousands of readers was the point here. The real goal was to arrive to the end, meet the competition’s requirements and feel proud at the end of this story – and this is undoubtedly how I feel now

Statistics

I’d like to shortly presents a few interesting statistics concerning the content I produced during the 3 months of the competition (March-May 2017):

• I wrote 21 competition’s posts (including 1 published in February, so not really counted)
• I checked-in (added, changed or removed) 19,381 lines of code (including auto-generated parts)
• top-viewed post: Simple habits for better productivity with ~2600 views for the time of writing this post
• best-ever number of daily blog’s views: 2121 views on 28.05.2017
• top referrers: Reddit with 613 views, dotnetomaniak.pl with 603 views, Google Search with 365 views
• most views from: United States (1503), Poland (1418), United Kingdom (274)
• 33 comments added in total on the published blog posts.

What was good

I have listed several aspects of taking part in DSP competition that I feel especially good about. These include achieved goals, as well as some activities I wanted to begin doing since a piece of time.

(+) Blogging

Starting a technical blog is one of my best achievements in the competition. It showed me that I really like to publish my insights, share my knowledge with the others and just write solutions to precise issues I’ve met here. Even during those 3 months I referred back to the posts I’ve wrote few weeks ago when I needed to refresh something I already did. Writing a blog post about something, which is public and read by other people (in many cases more experienced programmers) enforces the writer to organize and collect the knowledge he or she is willing to share. This helps making self-learning process really solid and more effective.

(+) Learning mobile development with Xamarin

For a piece of time already I’ve wanted to start mobile development with Xamarin platform. Maybe I haven’t arrived to deeply advanced development stuff, but I definitely learnt the basics of Xamarin and implementing Android apps using it. I was able do it with my daily-used C#, so there was no big entry threshold here, even with many really frustrating issues met on my “Xamarin way” which I’ve been sharing with you here

(+) Open-source contribution

I had an opportunity to publish my source code on public GitHub repository, so other people can potentially see and make a use of it.  I really love the idea of open-source, so it was another nice experience. I even found out that each public repository should have a license file added to be considered “really open-source”

(+) Reading other participants’ blogs

During my DSP adventure I’ve been reading many blog posts published by the other competition’s members. I’d even say that I’ve never read that many posts from different authors in such short period of time. It allowed me to see different writing styles and get the knowledge about various kinds of technologies I had never worked with.

(+) Learning, learning, learning…

Basically – I learn maaaany things during the competition. Starting from technical stuff about Xamarin, through writing a blog, configuring and setting-up WordPress, promoting myself on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Reddit to gaining a lot of knowledge by reading another blog posts on totally various topics. Those 3 months definitely generated a lot of valuable knowledge of different kinds in my head.

What was bad

Of course I also have few aspects of my activity during the competition that I consider as done in a wrong way. I’m also putting here few things that made me frustrated during the competition and wasn’t even my personal mistakes.

(-) Wrong planning

The most basic mistake I’ve made (and I make it in many aspects of my life, as many of us, probably ) was a wrong planning. I wanted to write it was too ambitious, but it’s not even really the case. In the beginning of the competition I should have made a long-perspective planning (what parts of my app should be completed until what date, how many posts should I publish each week/month etc). It would probably help me to do more and eliminate lack of time I’ve met during the contest.

(-) Irregularity in posts’ publishing

I know that I was publishing my posts totally irregularly, sometimes at late hours when everyone potentially interested was already sleeping I also didn’t establish any constant days on which posts on my blog were to be published. This was wrong. It’s another consequence of wrong planning.

(-) Not promoting the blog enough

In general, promotion of my blog posts boiled down to publishing the URLs on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. By the end of DSP I realized the power of Reddit – it’s really worth thinking about promoting good content we produce there. I also could have been more involved in DSP channel on Devs PL Slack – many interesting discussions were held there and people got to know each other

(-) Too long blog posts

During few weeks in those 3 last months, I had really limited time to work on my DSP project – especially when it came to publishing a blog post, which was a mandatory requirement. Sometimes I really felt this is a mandatory requirement, not a pleasure. However, if I’d have written shorter blog posts, but maybe with a bit less of content, I wouldn’t have such feeling. When writing my posts I was many times starting a post with “In this short post (…)” and then, after 1 or 2 hours writing it, I came back to the introduction in order to remove the “short” word from it

(-) Fighting with “machines”

That’s the part I surely never enjoy about the programming – fighting with weird, unknown issues met during development. Few weeks during the last 3 months were really hard in terms of time for the competition’s tasks, but some were really loose during which I was initially highly motivated to make a significant progress in development of MoneyBack app. However, then I was encountering mysterious problems with Xamarin, Visual Studio and other things which only made me really frustrated and burnt out all the motivation I’ve had. There are some positive aspects of it – for instance creating and self-answering a StackOverflow’s thread which really bumped my statistics on that portal

What I would change the next time

If I take part in the competition again (next year, maybe? ), I’d obviously try to get rid of all above-mentioned bad aspects of my work. The must-dos for the next time are:

• plan the work from the beginning to the end of the competition (set concrete, long-perspective deadlines)
• publish tasks list (like Trello board) in the beginning on the project so the deadlines set are “promised” publicly
• set-up fixed days and times during the week when blog posts are published (use WordPress’s automatic delayed publishing)
• write shorter blog posts that can be read in ~5 minutes with less, but more decent content
• before using a particular solution for an issue, better examine the other possibilities, i.e. don’t choose to use the UI component firstly found in Xamarin docs (which are not always very good quality) – explore the other blog posts on that topic and see what other people used.

Summary – so what’s next?

For sure I will still work on MoneyBack project. You can follow the progress on its GitHub repository. It’s a great app for pet-project which I was missing before.

Of course, I will also run this blog as I really enjoy sharing my knowledge here, both for the others and for myself to be able to refer back to it after some time.

I’d like to congratulate all DajSiePoznac2017’s participants for your endurance and the commitment we all did to both open-source world and programming blogosphere. I wish you all the best of luck in voting for the best DSP blog/project. Hopefully see you on 17.06.2017 in Warsaw on the official closing of the competition

I also want to say thank you to Daga who supported me in my way throughout the competition and many evenings spent on writing blog posts or programming

I’m also very grateful to all blog’s readers and supporters who left any feedback or comments here – your insights were very helpful!

See ya!

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Today I’d like to share with you my idea for the application – what I require from it, what functionalities I imagine it to have and what technologies I want to use. This is going to be rather short post, I don’t want to spend too much time on imagining the functionalities (I rather prefer to start working on it). It won’t be much detailed also, just a high-level overview of what I imagine my project to look like.

A need

As I already described in my DSP introduction post, the idea for MoneyBack came from a need. I just need a kind of system, which would allow me to make splitting the money spent on a group’s needs easier. Currently I perform such tasks quite often and I do it manually. Those include any types of activities/things you paid for, whilst being used also by the others: food ordered with your workmates, beer you paid for in the pub with your friends, shopping made with your girlfriend, sports event you attended with a group of others or any other types of activities you can imagine.

I know there are many mobile/web applications doing that job, however MoneyBack will rather focus on the person who is the payer – it will help him/her firstly just to properly and easily split the costs and secondly – what is maybe more important – to keep the others informed/reminded (if necessary) about the money they owe.

Requirements and functionalities

I will divide the requirements that MoneyBack application is going to meet into two groups: must-haves and nice-to-haves. By a must-have I understand something I essentially want the application to help me (and the people using it, hopefully ) with, like the core and basic functionalities without which I can’t imagine it finished. Like the minimum requirements for my DSP project. On the other hand, by a nice-to-have I see a part of the system I’d love to have, but is not essential for the project being.

Must-haves:

• [Android] Adding people (that are meant to be included in money splitting) by email (+ other personal details)
• [Android] Creating one-time events/expenses with amount paid, people assigned, payment due date, bank account details, attachments (e.g. invoice/receipt PDF)
• [Android] Automatic calculation of costs split per person
• [Android] Generating one-time event’s/expense’s summary email to be sent to all participants with all the details
• [Android] Marking particular event’s participants as “paid” (to indicate that person has already paid what he/she owes)
• [Android] Notifications about a possibility to generate and send a reminder email to people who haven’t paid yet if the due date is coming
• [Android] Creating recurring events (e.g. once per week, once per month etc.) + notifications about the summary emails to send when the recurring event’s date is coming
• [Android] Possibility to export application’s data backup to GoogleDrive / file

Nice-to-haves:

• [Android] Adding people (that are meant to be included in money splitting) by phone number
• [Android] Possibility to connect person added with the Contact (integration with phonebook)
• [Android/Web] Possibility of account creation in the application for synchronization of application’s data to the web service
• [Web] Web interface allowing to login and see the details of events created in the mobile app
• [Web] Possibility to share a link to the event’s summary that can be given to all participants (so there is no need to send summary email)
• [Web] Managing the expenses/events in the web application
• [Web] Possibility of account creation on the web app
• [Web] Possibility to mark events as “monitored” so the reminder emails about payments are sent automatically to the participants from the server
• [Android] Support of multiple currencies (manual exchange rates definition) so that some people can pay in PLN, some in EUR for the same event
• [Android] Defining groups of people
• [Android] Possibility to download exchange rates from the Internet
• [Android] Defining expenses’ categories
• [Android/Web] Logging with social media (Fb, Google)
• [Android/Web] Charts/statistics for the payments/events/expenses

Those are just general requirements which came to my mind and they may change during the project’s development. Maybe you have some other ideas for such application’s functionalities that you’d find useful ? If yes, let me know in the comments.

Technologies

Above all, MoneyBack is going to be an Android application written in C# language using Xamarin platform. I will also need some good, but tiny local database on the device. I don’t know what are the best ones to use in Android/Xamarin (maybe some of you can advise me something?), but I suppose it could be for instance SQLite. I will mostly focus on the mobile app. In the worst case, as the very minimum, I’d like to finish mobile application so it meets the minimal requirements and is possible to be used by the others.

The second and very interesting part of MoneyBack project would be to have a web service with which the application would synchronize. It would require the replication of device’s local database structures on the server side and exposing some API after (maybe JSON?). Then it would be perfect to have a possibility to at least see created events/expenses details in the web app, which would require adding some web UI to the application. If I ever manage to get to this part, I would like to use ASP.NET Core for creating a simple server-side web app, maybe hosting it on some Linux machine. I’d also need some simple, but reliable database system, for example MySQL which could also be easily hosted on Linux server.

Summary

MoneyBack will primarily be an Android app. If I manage to create web app it’s great. No more declarations for now, let’s start working. The next post in the scope of DSP will cover Xamarin installation into Visual Studio, configuration, first pieces of code and deployment of the application to the mobile phone.

I encourage you to give your feedback in the comments

PS: I need to make a small disclaimer here: I have to admin – what I didn’t mention in my previous post – that it was my creative girlfriend who came up with the name of the project (MoneyBack, initially GiveMyMoneyBack) who I’m cordially greeting from this place  I hope she will be supportive enough so I don’t arrive to the end of DSP with MoneyBack, but no girlfriend Plus as I’ve just made the disclaimer, she won’t have any claims to the app when it already makes millions of dollars 

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Basic concept of DSP

Long story short, the main concept behind DSP is to develop an open-source project of any kind, in any technology, in the same time sharing your knowledge and project’s development processes by blogging about it. The competition lasts for 3 months – from March to May – during which at least 10 weeks must be spent on project’s development and blogging. At least 2 blog posts per week must be written, from which one must be about the project itself, and the other may be on any IT-related topic. As the project is open-source, source code is stored on public Git repository on GitHub.

My way for DajSiePoznac

When the competition was held last year I regretted I finally didn’t take part. I was sure I must try the next year, so now it’s happening

Normally I have not much time for programming or developing pet projects after work, as I’m still finishing my Master’s studies on weekends, but this time I decided to take part in the competition as I think it may be (actually it already is!) very motivating to develop myself, broaden my horizons by exploring new technologies and finally to open for the programming community by blogging. I’m very excited, so let’s see how it goes!

Looking for a project’s idea

I spent few weeks trying to find an idea for the project to do for DSP’17. I had two assumptions looking for it:

• technology must be .NET-related
• the app/framework/solution to develop should solve a real life problem

Apart from those two, I’ve always wanted to develop an Android application using Xamarin, writing C# code. During my engineering studies I’ve had a chance to take part in a great project in which I was responsible for back-end development of an Android application, but it was written in Java. I also had almost no programming experience that time, so the quality of this product wasn’t the best (it was however very good project in the end).

I even installed Xamarin last year, but it wasn’t free for use yet that time – I had some student license, but I had that feeling that even if I create an app using it, after my license expires I would need to stop developing it or pay quite much for it. Now, as Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft and it’s free, it’s even more motivating to use it.

Apart from that, I’ve never finally programmed using Xamarin, so it’s totally new technology for me which is also the advantage I can learn it.

So I’ve had my technology chosen. Then, I considered many different ideas for the project, each time realizing that something like that already exists, which made me very demotivated… And then I realized that actually it doesn’t matter what idea or project I choose, if it already exists or not – it should be something I’d like to do and what seems interesting to myself. In the end that would be me developing that product*, right?

* I used word “product” above, which means something that may be really used by the other people, but for me this may only be a “side effect” of DSP’s contribution. If I manage to create something useful for the others – that’d be great. If I don’t –  it’s still cool. The most important is to take a part in the competition, survive to the end and be proud.

MoneyBack – my project for DSP’17

Finally I decided to create an Android mobile application, written in Xamarin using C#, which purpose is to help settling the money between group of people (friends, family, workmates etc.).

Many times I’ve personally been in the situations when I pay for some activity in which a group of people take part. After, the money needs to be split between all participants. First of all, I’ve always done it manually, creating some Excel file which counted how much money does the particular person owns and to whom. Secondly, sometimes there are cumbersome situations when someone owns you the money, but just forgets about it (even you reminded him/her few times already) – you don’t want to be rude coming to the person all the time asking “give my money back, *****!” ), so the app will do that for you. That’s why I called the project MoneyBack (wanted it to be GiveMyMoneyBack initially, but I consider it too long!) – there are already many costs-splitting applications, but this one will rather focus on the person who pays for the others. Of course its other purposes are just to split the amounts between the people, calculate who owns how much to whom, send notifications to the participants etc. so you don’t need to use Excel or contact everyone separately to tell them how much they owe you and for what.

More details to come. I’ll focus on the mobile app first. I’d like to create also some kind of web service (e.g. using ASP.NET Core, which would also be the technology I’ve not used so far), with which the app would synchronize (e.g. to present the summary and current state of settlements on the web page visible to all participants or keep the history and backups), but I don’t want to make any declarations. First, let’s focus on the Android side, then we’ll see

You will be able to find MoneyBack‘s source code on GitHub.

Summary

Next weeks and months (hopefully!) are going to be intensive. I hope I’ll arrive to the end of DSP’17. I wish all the participants good luck and all the best in your daily works on your projects See you soon!

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