20 years of Blaze...

The 1st of September marks a major milestone in my life.  It will mean that I have been running my company, Blaze Business Software Pty Ltd for 20 years now.  Two decades.  It seems almost unbelievable to me at times.

Back in September 1996, I had only been married for a month, I was about to turn 30, and I decided to start a software consultancy business out of my bedroom.  Thus began the rollercoaster, including getting an office in the Cullen Bay area of Darwin, growing the team to at one stage around 16 people, and then now coming full circle to just my wife and I working from a home office again in a 'lifestyle' business.

So many changes in the IT industry at that time.  When I started Blaze, the internet was just hitting mainstream here in Australia, and everything was still dial up.  We were one of the first offices to get an ISDN line into our office, and I clearly remember setting up a small Windows 98 server in the back which was running some sort of DOS mail daemon so that we could have individual email addresses for every employee.  Something that was so rare back then.

We were also one of the first companies locally to upgrade to Microsoft Exchange and implement ActiveSync.  I clearly remember proudly showing off how I could read and reply to emails on my Palm Pilot in real time to all my clients.  Nowadays that is just an expected thing, but back then I was pleased that we were pushing the envelope and being cutting edge.

Lots of nice memories, such as being the finalist in the Telstra Small Business Awards up here in 1998 I think.  Lots of other small awards and achievements.  But there were also some really tough times, and many days where I didn't know whether I wanted to close the doors forever and go raise sheep in the Italian mountains.

But through all that, I still wake up every day and look forward to doing the work I do.  I am always grateful to have met so many wonderful people through my business.  From clients (many of whom I still work with 20+ years later), to employees who have become close friends, to colleagues and competitors and everyone who has walked through the doors or called in the past 2 decades.  Thank You.

Proving that it is never too late to be a 'startup', this year I have embarked on a whole new reboot of the business, as we become a SaaS company providing subscription based business software.  Given that I will be turning 50 this year, I don't know if I will have the energy to keep on with the consulting and support role for many more years, and I am looking forward to setting up a passive income source from a modern, web based subscription platform.

Just another step in our long and interesting journey.  Hope to see you all along the way...

Building a $20 "Prince" guitar

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The past weekend was the ANZAC day long weekend, and seeing as I am a little burned out with programming work at the moment, I decided to take a little break from the keyboard and screen, and to tackle a project that I have been thinking about for years now - building a "cigar box" style guitar.

I've seen many people build these online, but never actually tried myself, so I looked around the house this weekend and decided that I had enough scrap material lying around to give it a go.

I don't actually have any cigar boxes lying around, but my wife did have an old art supply carry case that she no longer used, which was sitting in the back of the shed going mouldy, so she said I could have that.  Great.  I found a nice long piece of Merbau timber that was perfect for the neck.  80% there!  Collecting some old tuners from a dismantled Squier Strat, and cutting up some threaded rod and buying an ornate bracket, and we pretty much had all the parts for the guitar.  No excuses.

I posted about this build 'nearly live' on my Instagram account.  When I started posting, I had no idea whether the project would come to fruition or not, so I was taking a risk, but also, I was putting in place some accountability, because I knew I had an audience following along with me.

I also had no plans - just a rough idea of how to go about this from a blog post I had seen many months ago.  Never mind - I actually built a real acoustic guitar 3 years ago, so this couldn't be any more difficult, could it?

As it turns out, the process was fairly straightforward, and I managed to accomplish the build using rudimentary tools, and some very journeyman carpentry skills.  As you can see from the progress photos, I decided to put frets on the neck of this guitar, although that was a moot point, as I was going to set it up as a very high action slide guitar.

Once I had assembled the guitar proper (with some able assistance from my older son), I handed the project off to my wife, and asked her to paint anything she liked on it.

Given the current loss to the music world, she decided to paint a portrait of Prince on the guitar, and I think she did a fabulous job of it.

That was a really fun build, and kept most of the family occupied and creative, and we ended up with a great tribute to a superb artist that left us all too soon.

My 30 day app challenge...

About a year ago, my wife approached me with an idea.  It was the new year, 2014, and she was lamenting over the fact that she felt that we had not achieved the goals we had set out for ourselves back in 2013.  "Wouldn't it be nice" she said, "if there was an app that would let us set some goals, then allow us to track our progress towards those goals, and perhaps pop up a reminder from time to time to let us know we are on track...".

We searched around the app store, and while there were apps there that came close, none seemed to fit the bill.  "We should write that app!" she declared.  I nodded in agreement, but in the back of my mind, I know that my current 'real' work schedule didn't give me much spare time to even contemplate such a project.  We put together some vague specs for the app in a Google Doc, but it basically just sat there gathering dust.

Fast forward to the beginning of December, and I caught myself remembering that conversation from earlier in the year.  I realised that once again, we had fallen into the old habits of letting goals slip by in 2014.  After all, wasn't the idea to write a goal tracking app a goal in itself?

I had the usual end of year madness upon me, with clients wanting projects finished before the Christmas closure, but I looked at the vague specs my wife and I drew up earlier, and decided "Right!".  

I was going to do this.

Not only was I going to do this, but I was going to do it before the end of the year, so that the app would be ready to go out to the masses for the New Year 2015.  That gave me 30 days.  Factoring in the 2 week average approval period for the Apple App Store, it meant I would have to submit the final product for approval by mid December.  Time to get to work.

My first question was "Which platform?".  Both my wife and I are iPhone users, but my son has an Android phone and I wanted to cover both bases.  We decided iOS and Android would be the main platforms.  Windows, Blackberry etc. may have to come later.

Second question was "Which technology stack?".  I already had some familiarity with jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap etc., but I wanted a little more.  Then, I came upon a framework called Ionic, which is a mobile development framework based upon AngularJS.  When I first saw the demos for AngularJS, I went "Whoa!" in an excited way as I saw two way data binding etc. in action.  Then I delved deeper and looked at the code behind the scenes and went "Whoa!' in a kind of horrified, opening Pandora's box kind of way.

It certainly wasn't going to be an easy framework to get to grips with.  New methodologies and protocols such as Directives, Services, Factories, Promises etc. would be a completely new way of thinking about app development than what I was used to.

Nevertheless, I rolled my sleeves up and dived in head first.  Being a relatively new framework, Ionic questions and tips were hard to find on Google or StackOverflow.  Lots of things were trial and error.  Also, being on the 'bleeding edge' of current app development tools, there were a lot of incomplete things or things that would change literally overnight.  I would be in the middle of a late night coding session and would get a message saying that a new release was available.  Sometimes twice in the same evening!

One of the saving factors was the excellent community around Ionic, AngularJS and Cordova.  Plenty of REALLY smart people who are also generous with their time and knowledge.  I found some great blog posts which covered the areas I got stuck in, such as using SQLite databases on a mobile device via Cordova and Ionic.

Well, not 9 days later, we had an app ready to submit to the two app stores.  Not even I could believe it.  In reality, I had finished the first 1.0 version in about 6 days, but then when my wife and I tested the early version, we realised we wanted a few more things in there, so I went back to work to add more features.

Some 'simple' sounding features, like local notifications, proved to be a lot trickier than I imagined.  But once again, the Ionic forums came to the party and I found the answers there.  I even managed to improve on one of the answers a bit myself, and contributed back on the forums, so hopefully someone else in the same boat can get through the issue quickly.

Finally, on the evening of the 13th December, we submitted the app to both stores.  It is called BlissBank (which is the name my wife came up with) and hopefully will be approved by Apple by the 31st December.  There are still lots of things that I wanted to add to the app, and to clean up within it, but for now it appears to be stable, and will at least give us the chance to get a small user base together and get some feedback before we develop the next version.

It's been a long time since I went 'heads down' with such intensity on a project.  But being a personal project, and the brainchild of my own wife made it special and added a lot of incentive.  Kudos to my wife for giving me total support and allowing me as much time as I needed to go hard at this project too.  She took care of the other normal distractions around the house, like taking the kids out for long outings etc. to give me space and quiet.  Especially seeing as she was in the middle of launching her first art exhibition.

Now, I just have this one other idea for an app that would be useful for the New Year... Hmm... wonder if I can squeeze that in...

Cyclone Tracy - 40 years on

I have been thoroughly enjoying reading the stories on Facebook from my friends who lived through the destructive forces of Cyclone Tracy, 40 years ago.  My contribution isn't as poignant or direct as some of theirs, but it has a (kind of) twist ending.

During that time, I was about 8 years old, and we lived in a small town called Taiping, in my birth country of Malaysia.  At that stage as a kid, I had never travelled outside of the country.

The day after Christmas in 1974, my family was over at a neighbours house having drinks to celebrate the festivities.  The grown ups however, were distracted and talking about this devastating storm called a 'cyclone' that had destroyed an entire town called Darwin in Northern Australia.  As an impressionable kid, I was quite shaken by the serious, grave tones of the adults, and I left the party early to run back home to our own house.

We had a huge map of the world taped to the wall outside the bedroom my sisters and I shared, and I went and found a map pin and scoured the whole map for this place called "Darwin".  When I found it, I stuck the pin into the map over it, and vowed that I would NEVER, EVER go to that place in the world as long as I lived.

Well, just 4 years later, we were packing all our worldly belongings (and getting rid of most of it) to emigrate to Australia...to... a place called Darwin.  A place which I have happily called my home for three quarters of my life.