What makes this book different from my last two is that it isn’t a collection of works or a how-to guide, it’s a direct sequel to “Live for Free: The Chronicles of a Nerd Saving For A Startup”. It’s a real, brutally honest account of some tumultuous times in our industry, and in my own life. The introduction is below and you can read a couple of chapters embedded after the click-through, or feel free to download the PDF directly from here. They are sort of but not really in order.

Flash back to the beginning of December, 2011. The year has been a whirlwind. My first start-up failed. My second and third book were released. I became an Android developer. I released more Android apps in less time than anyone, ever. I joined a Google Ventures funded music start-up as their Android lead. I found out the truth about the Android platform (it’s not there yet), and about working at start-ups (it’s the VC that gets the best deal). And I just found out my significant other wants to move across the country. How I got here, that’s fairly common knowledge. How I’ll get where I’m going now? That’s another story.

Download (PDF, 80.89KB)

So do what I did, take an old licence plate and bend it into the letter 6. Loop this around the support leg of your stand, cut out a chunk for the power cord, and you’ve got a timely tablet stand to stand the test of table time.

Here, have a screenshot.

* Oh and a quick update, apparently my site got over 3 million hits yesterday, can anyone else confirm this? I’m just estimating from rolling Apache logs. It’s a shame I removed all advertising from the site, eh? hehe.

• Between 4 and 6pm yesterday I open-sourced 80 full projects on GitHub. This is the the highest number of full software projects ever open sourced by an individual GitHub developer in one day.
• 60 of these were open sourced over a one hour period, also a record.
• This vaulted me up to around number 500 in total number of repositories. What’s more, none of my repositories are forks of other projects. It’s likely I’m closer to the top 200-300 if you remove forked projects from the equation (which I don’t, but it’s interesting nonetheless).
• 68 of these applications are Android apps. That makes it the largest repository of released open source Android applications available anywhere, and the largest number by a single developer anywhere.
• 65 of these open-source apps were written in a single 60 day period, with a minimum of one written and released on the Android app market per day.
• This is the highest number of applications released by a single developer on a daily basis ever.
• No other developer has ever accomplished the 60 apps in 60 days challenge, ever, anywhere, at any time, in any metric. Period. [yes that is a direct challenge to you other developers out there ]
• Almost 1 year later, all but two of these apps remain on the App market (Atari threw a takedown notice at the pong clone and I removed the file scrambler from the market when it didn’t work on certain low memory phones).

1. Ping Rebooter
2. Title Bar Scroller
3. SNES Screensaver Script
4. Super Simple RSS
5. Python Food Statistics
6. Paint Camera With Laser Pointer
7. Gmail Save Game Saver
8. File Metadata app
9. A Pair of THC Calculators
10. Easy Execute Library
11. CSServer Adventure (A console RPG)

Seriously, all the sources. Every one. To start with, I’ve created repositories for the roughly 70 Android applications I’ve released. As of today, you can browse through them all on my GitHub account page.

Unfortunately for me, the task of open sourcing 100+ projects is a daunting one, so I set about writing a script to troll my folders and create GitHub projects. This script itself is also available on GitHub here. Read on for more info about the construction of the script.

I started with a folder full of my android applications, but you can apply this to any set of directories. You’ll need curl, git, and your GitHub username and API key. The script simply creates a set of repositories with a combination of passed and inferred metadata.

I started by getting my API access key, metadata prefix, and github user-name and read them in via parameter as follows.

# we want k for api key, x for prefix, u for username, h for help
# pre-set prefix to APPLICATION
PREFIX="APPLICATION";

if [ -z "$USERNAME" ];
then
echo "Must have a API KEY set!"
echo "Usage: createGitHubscript.sh -k GITHUB_API_KEY -u GITHUB_USERNAME -x DESCRIPTION_PREFIX" ;
exit 0;
fi


Here I iterate over each folder in the passed-in directory.

for dir in `ls "$src/"`
do
if [ -d "$src/$dir" ]; then


From the folder name I glean the title of the app, which is used to create the application on GitHub via their yaml api. I also sleep 5 seconds after repository creation, for politeness.

cleandir="${dir// /_}";

echo "Now sleep 5 seconds for politeness";
sleep 5;


After this is completed, I move into the directory, and initialize a git repository, add all the files, make the first commit, and push it up to GitHub.

# init git
git init;

# push it on up
git push origin master


And that’s that. You can see the full code at the script’s git repository. Feel free to browse the avalanche of source code that’s hitting GitHub from my computer today

You can see it in action live on my website at http://hunterdavis.com/asljs/, or view the source at its github page here.  With this update asl.JS is fast becoming a modern, and hopefully useful web tool.  Everything still runs on the client in Javascript, and no personal data or strings are ever sent to the server (I don’t even run analytics on the page).  I have quite a few useful features and improvements I’d like to get in there eventually, and I hope that others will find the code useful in their own work.  Incidentally, this has all grown from a project that was essentially a code doodle from a bored hacker.  It just goes to show that even the smallest of contributions to open source can increase in value exponentially over time.  You never know what others will find useful, so get out there and share!

Check it out on the official Miso Media Tuner page.

While you may have used an iOS or Android strobe tuner, or perhaps a multi-thousand dollar real-life tuner, I guarantee you’ve never seen anything like this before.

Miso Media will be officially launching this HTML5 web strobe tuner on their corporate site before their Shark Tank episode this week.  It uses Flash to provide microphone access until browsers support HTML5 audio in.  For you musicians and vocalists out there, this is huge.  Head over to the web tuner, and use your laptop or PC microphone to tune your instrument on a full stroboscopic tuner in real-time.  Everything happens client-side, with nothing sent to the server and no data usage for users who may be on mobile plans.  There is nothing to purchase, no complex hardware to lug around, and no setup required.

That said, not everybody has Flash and I’m certainly no big fan of Adobe’s business model.  I wrote the web tuner in a completely modular way, with Flash being used for only the most bare minimum of microphone functions.  Because of this, I’ve created a ‘demo’ HTML5 strobe tuner that you can use with audio files.  No Flash is required, but you will need a browser that supports the html5 audio tag (Chrome for now, all other browsers to come soon).  A musician I forwarded this to told me: ‘This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen on the web, period.”  I don’t know if it stands up to said proclamation, but I am terrifically proud of my work, and hope you enjoy it.  The code is minified to protect their IP, but my hope is that some future version will be open source as their algorithms change over time.

You can try out the pure HTML5 Strobe tuner here, and you can view it embedded in my impress.JS resume here.