Josh Sharp

I consumed a lot of stuff in the last year.

Over recent years, Belle and I have got into the habit of making some sort of interactive birthday card for each other’s birthday, a puzzle or game.

Every day lately I see ordinary people falling into traps when thinking about what the tech bros want us to call “AI”, which stands for “artificial intelligence”.

For me, the height of the covid pandemic and its lockdowns coincided with the back-half of a period of burnout where I just couldn’t face sitting at my desk in front of my desktop computer.

I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, but Belle and I have made a SaaS product with web, Android, and iOS apps, starting from scratch, and over the years built it to the point where it pays us both to work on it full-time.

I ditched physical books many years ago, and had until recently been happily reading on a first-gen Kindle Paperwhite.

I’ve been kicking around this idea for a while.

Here it is, the latest in the series of yearly reviews.

These days, if you have a great idea for software — maybe an app, maybe some “Software as a Service” — you’d be forgiven for thinking that what you really ought to do is start a startup.

Following on from the last two, here’s a review of a recent year in which I existed.

As an experiment and side project, I’m writing a programming language that compiles to Go.

I've been thinking a lot lately on work and capitalism.

Yes, you read correctly.

I quite enjoyed writing a review for 2015, so I thought I'd continue the ritual for another year.

As programming matures and shifts to higher-level abstractions, it becomes more and more about assembling pre-made building blocks and less about writing new, novel solutions of your own.

I find it interesting to read others' reviews of the year and their progress and discoveries, so I thought I'd share my own.

Earlier this year, I decided I would try to create my own toy language.

This was originally posted on the Hello Code blog.

In February, I decided I would get rid of my side project of the last two years, blaster.fm.

I started blaster.fm in late 2010 with only a vague idea of what I wanted to do with it.

I finally updated the site to reflect current standards.

I have been trying to find a basic proof-of-concept for twitter user streams.

If you use Firefox 5, 6, 7, 8, or greater in Windows, without ClearType, you've probably noticed how abysmal the font rendering is.

I don't consider myself a designer at all, but I do enjoy pushing pixels.

...unless it can show you all of your open app windows and let you switch between them with a swipe and a tap.

I recently signed up as to the Android Market as a developer so I could buy a "Google Dev Phone 1" which is an unlocked HTC Dream/G1.

Update: Twitterscribe is now public.

So recently I've been having a play with Python.

I've been hunting for a new tool to help me mockup sites lately.

I've mentioned previously that I'm really excited about Android.

It's been a while, folks.

I've recently moved house, and last weekend I went for my second grocery shop at Safeway, my new local supermarket.

Twitter is a funny little thing.

When I came up with the domain name techAU, it wasn't already taken — but it wasn't unique either.

It didn't take long, and now it's live.

Who said that laziness doesn't yield good results?

I've recently discovered popurls.com.

Sometimes it might seem like what your manager wants you to do, and what you wish you could do, are two different things.

Okay, so the idea is this: an Android app that takes a set of criteria for what sort of real estate you're looking for – price, no. bedrooms, etc. – and uses its location-awareness to alert you to real estate within your area that matches your criteria.

So, you may have noticed that I don't update this blog all that often.

Windows Vista has been almost universally panned, by critics and users alike.

A comic about IE and Firefox, for your viewing pleasure.

You may have noticed I've been getting into the whole 'blogger' thing lately.

I know it's naive, but I thought that coming up with a great idea was the main stumbling block for a startup.

This year, one of my big plans is to start a tech blog.

There are user interface elements that don't have a corresponding "interface" in real life — things like application windows, for example.

Merry Christmas and happy New Year everyone.

Just wanted to share this story with everyone.

Image credit: J Konig One of the hardest things to do when it comes to web services is to get people to just try your site out.

Just a quick note as this space should be reserved for useful content.