01.05.2025
So first and foremost I want to say that I have some ideas and even some concrete things that I want to accomplish by the end of the year. I also am aware that I am writing this with a little over half a year to go, therefore I might not reach some of my goals but it's good to write them down nonetheless, because it creates a sense of commitment.
So that is my list, not extremely ambitious but also not that small. Maybe I can break down some of the items.
I have been looking at the newsletters that I follow along and they are already quite good, and my main takeaway is that sometimes they get a bit too big and want to reach the biggest audience there is. Of course that is a valid argument but then we start seeing newsletters with courses, a job board, sponsored content, etc...and this kind of thing makes it a bit more harder to enjoy. You have to filter out the non-important information and find the gold nuggets buried within them.
My idea which is not novel, in any way shape or form, is to "roll my own" newsletter. Basically I have been playing with the idea of an aggregator of articles for some time and also launched a Cloudflare worker already to parse the RSS feed for a set of blogs from developers inside the Android and Kotlin community. I also have a list of blogs from other devs that do not have an RSS feed but that I want to build scrapers for. The main goal is to publish a set of articles monthly or bi-monthly. But I have to do a couple of things first, namely I want to also reach out to them and ask if that is okay, and I also want to build what is left of the aggregator. The last bit is far more fun for me which will be curating the articles going into each new edition, it's going to be fun because I am sure I will learn a lot when I am reading each article to see if it should go on the list or not.
So the goal is simple, but the breakdown will be long:
I don't personally love the currently look, but I also do not want to "waste" time learning CSS in order to make it pretty. This will be something that I want to do in the upcoming months, just tweak the blog a bit here nad there to make it a bit nicer, but I also do not want to make it bloated and super futuristic with the CSS skills I will probably vibe code and not really learn that much of.
I hope at least I can make a better UI, and I don't want to change too much, as I like the current simplicity of it. I am thinking just of minor cosmetic improvements for now.
There is no concrete timeline for this, I will just iterate over it from time to time.
This one is a bit more vague, I want to publish an app but I am also haunted by the initial setup that one must make to make it work.
I am also not sure which of my ideas will also become a reality, but this goal should push me to do at least one of them to completion.
This is going to be as vague and short as the previous one, perhaps they can overlap but it is highly dependent on me learning KMP.
My initial goal was to write a lot of blogposts, but in the face of my ambitious goals and poor execution I will actually be strict and aim low. I think 1 blog post is enough per month, that is a low barrier and it does not in any way shape or form mean that I cannot write more posts.
There are also some ideas, specially around technical content that I will be posting soon. I have in my personal notes topics such as:
I have an idea to make a device info SDK, basically I want to fetch some information that the Android OS can give both as a way to show all the things that are possible to "track" without the need for runtime permissions (there is a nice chunk) and also to enable companies and indie devs to use a nice SDK to get some of that info, that is currently scattered across multiple different Android services/components.
Things that I am thinking about tracking:
So the list is long and will probably grow longer, the main takeaway is that these are all present and can be queried but they are also in distinct parts of the Android system services which you need to know about. Perhaps I can make an SDK to gather these into a single callable component, there are also lots of casts for each service that can happen and it's just boilerplate in the end. With these reasons I think I can make improvements to the developer's lives here.
So there are quite a few things here, and no concrete pipeline. I will need to think about what to prioritise first, for example I have been wanting to do the Device Info SDK for some time and maybe it's the thing I will try to do first. As for the rest some fo them can be done every now and then such as the blogpost per month goal or the blog UX improvements. For the rest it will take much longer to create the supporting systems to enable all of it.
I will leave this as open as I started it, and hope to finish it all by 31st of December of 2025.