After finishing my swiping app I ventured into hardware design. Tinkering with an old Arduino set, which included a lot of sensors, at home, I decided to let JLCPCB manufacture my first hardware device. My plan was to design a USB dongle which would act as an intermediary between my keyboard and PC. I’m using the Dvorak layout for typing. Tired of constantly changing the default settings in Windows and other operating systems, I decided it was time for a hardware solution.

In terms of digital media production and publishing books I didn’t finish any more projects so far in 2023. I have been mastering DaVinci Resolve for the last couple of years. I started writing a book on Life Long Software Engineering, but couldn’t find enough motivation to finish it so far. My book sales on Amazon have been decreasing steadily over the last months. Apart from the AI hype, there is little to no progress in computing / computer science.

Spent some time learning to program with Android Studio. The emulator is quite decent and deploying to my old Huawei P30 phone was also a piece of cake. I wrote a Tinder clone from scratch including the back end - see screen recording video above. Everything was production ready but I decided against publishing it on the Playstore, as Google is changing its requirements for apps weekly and I would soon become their slave.

Recently spent some time studying tax laws and tax return forms. Running a business in Austria is actually very simple. Accounting is simple. Implemented an online form for PDF invoice generation for my company. No idea why some people waste hundreds of Euros on tax advisors (Steuerberater in German) and overpriced accounting / book keeping software. Still I have to admit: taxes are annoying, technical and tedious. I can understand anyone who doesn’t want to invest his/her precious time in this topic.

Created a chess calendar with difficult/critical positions featuring my own online chess games. Wrote some python scripts to generate the chess boards and then put together a Word document in open office. The formatting wasn’t as easy as expected, as I wanted all the pages to be turned 90 degrees. Addendum: I sold quite a few on Amazon in the weeks after publishing it.