I am sure this happens to every software developers at least once in their working life, especially if one works alone like I do with ecto. My mind has not been on developing ecto this week. It started on Sunday when I ran into a wall with a 3rd party component that I was trying out. Posted on their support forum and got answers back during Monday and Tuesday but unfortunately nothing that would help me move forward.
Continue reading “Dev Blues” →

I managed to work on ecto a bit on Friday evening and late into the night last night. I didn’t go to bed until 2:50 AM! I was planning to work most of today on ecto as well but my PC laptop refused to connect to the Wi-Fi network this afternoon, and thus no CVS access. After trying to fix it for 30 minutes and I couldn’t find a single ethernet cable in the apartment I took that as a sign and gave up. I ended up playing Rogue Spear until 4 PM when I went to the cinema with Leah to see The Grudge starring Sarah Michelle Gellar… 🙂

I did manage to work on a number of items this evening when we got back from the cinema. The new UI is 90% done. But as my boss at my first programming job said,

“You spend 10% of the time working on the first 90% of the project, then spend 90% of the time for the last 10% of the work.”

So even though the UI is stable now, I am sure I will be spending time polishing up once more people start testing it.

There are also a few server issues (Blogware compatibility, Conversant compatibility, Blogger UTF-8 encoding (or rather lack of), and MT running on XP/SP2/IIS5 to name but a few) that I need to clear up before releasing this new version for public beta testing.

I’ve spent most of today adding a long overdue feature into the next version of ecto. I’ve never been satsified with the current profile setup process, and probably neither are the users. So for the next version there will be a ‘proper’ profile creation wizard in place of the existing dialog window. This new wizard also has auto discovery capability so if the blog has the relevant RSD link the wizard will automatically retrieve and populate the profile with the login information from the server.

Oh and by the way, this post is composed using the next version of ecto 🙂 There are still much to do but hopefully I will be able to let a few people to try the app out in the next few weeks time.

It’s been six months since the public release of ecto for Windows (formerly known as TypeWriter for around 4 months).

Here are some interesting statistics of the project as of today.

Lines of Code: 18500+

Not a lot of code really if you consider the amount of functionality the application provided. Though this figure does not include all the third party libraries that I use. Another point to consider (for those of you who doubt the virtue of using C# and the .Net Framework) is that if I were to code this application in “old” languages such as C++/MFC the amount of code will probably double in size if not triple. This is also not to mention the stress of using unmanaged language like C++. I pick this figure out of a hat (really) and have no information or links to back it up but it is based on my experience on working with both languages/frameworks.

Average Development Time Spent per Week: 5 hours/week

This is of course a very rough guess and with all averages, there are ups and downs. Some weeks, such as the weeks immediately after the launch in April and May, I must have spent at least twenty hours a week on ecto while recently I’ve spent as little as two hours per week.

Estimate Hourly Rate based on Licenses Sold: $4.5/hour

For comparisons, minimum wages in New Jersey or New York are both $5.15/hour so you guys are getting a bargain. And who says outsourcing to Asia is cheaper! 🙂 Of course, if my objective is to make a bunch of money I could have done something else completely such as working in the local MikeyD or sell one of my kidney or something. The aim of developing ecto remains the same since day one for me, which is to create something that I can call my own while at the same time provides a tool that let the users get on with composing blog entry and not let the tool gets in their way, and for myself to learn and use technologies that I won’t otherwise use in my day job.

Progress on the next version of ecto has been slow these last couple of weeks. I’ve only worked on the application for couple of hours yesterday after I came back from tennis. It doesn’t help that at work, we were asked to work longer hours in order to meet the project deadline in early November. So for the last week I had been working 11-12 hours shifts for three nights, and will continue until November.

Having said that, this new version is coming along nicely with lots of nice features that would be really difficult to implement in the current release version. I’ve shown early screen shot to a small group of people and the feedback are pretty encouraging so far. Let’s hope that I manage to find more time to work on ecto for the next few weeks.