You have to love spring time in Alberta.  The tulips have such a contrast against the snow at 21:30 on a Saturday evening:

I’ve been an independent consultant in IT for four years now.  One of the biggest things in my day-to-day activities is keeping track of my time.  Timekeeping has become a bit of a thing for me, even when I was an employee.  It probably stems back to about 1996 or so, when my first web application ever was a timesheet application I wrote while working at Alberta Transportation & Utilities (now Alberta Infrastructure).   It was in C++, using Netscape Commerce Server and CGI.  I even had to write my own libraries to parse the HTTP requests and came up with my own crude templating engine.  Yes I’m old.  Yes, it was interesting.  Yes, we have it better now.  No, I would not like to repeat that experience.

Anyway, over the years, I’ve tried many different things, from a VBA solution based on Outlook, Excel spreadsheets, to Timesheet.PHP, to a WebForms app based on the Timesheet.PHP database which I ported over to ASP.NET MVC when I wanted to expand my jQuery and ASP.NET MVC knowledge.  My little home-grown web app was good for what I needed it to do, but it wasn’t anything fancy.  If it was, I’d have sold it and become rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

In the early fall, a friend of mine told me about HarvestApp – a subscription based, online time-tracking application.  Thought I would give it a try.  My thinking at the time was that I’m not really in the business of writing a timesheet application, and I really need to keep track of time – as a consultant, billable hours are pretty important.  So, here I am now, almost six months later, and I will say that I like HarvestApp.  I find it quick, and easy to use.  I get easy to see reports.  You can create invoices (I don’t use HarvestApp to create my invoices, but you could).  You can track expenses.  It’s mobile friendly.  It’s moderately priced (IMHO – YMMV).  It has a public API so you can write your own applications against it. 

Anyway, don’t take my word on it, try it for yourself.

So, now that one month is almost up on 2010, I figured that it was time to start blogging about something again.  The first trick to this, of course, was to figure out what I wanted to do in 2010.  It does seem like there will be a lot of interesting things, technically speaking, coming up this year.

A couple of new things I want to look at over the remaining 11 months:

Mobile development, particularly with a focus on Android.  For the latter half of 2009 I have been dabbling in Android.  I believe that it’s time to go out on a bender, and in a drunken stupor get some embarrassing tattoo and join the Android Army.  So far, I’m at two out of three.  Not bad, huh?

Ruby is another technology I’d like to explore – particularly Rails.  I can help but think that the opinionated view that Rails development has taken is the way to go for the bulk of web development.  A lot of websites are basically just forms over data, and Rails seems to address that concern rather well.  To bad nobody around here in Edmonton does much Rails development.

.NET 4.0 and ASP.NET MVC2.  I know there is a lot of debate between Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC.  Personally, I think MVC is the better way.  Probably best to keep abreast of what is going on in the ASP.NET MVC world.  And, of course, the DLR in .NET will come to maturity soon.  By maturity I mean widespread acceptance.  If this happens, then maybe developers won’t get so hung up on languages:  i.e. “I’m a C# guy so VB.NET sucks”.

And finally, a guy needs hobbies.  Now granted, my past hobbies of alcohol and guns (no, not together at the same time) have served me well for the past 20 years or so. However, they are hard hobbies to share with my sons at this point in time.  So, at the start of winter I expanded the geek factor of my sons (and myself) by getting back into Warhammer.  Now the last time I played was about 20 years ago, with the 3rd edition rules.  In fact, I still have some of the books in my basement from back then.  Anyway, picked up The Battle for Skull Pass boxed set.  My son rather likes the Dwarfs.  I suspect it’s because he’s similar in stature/height to the stunties.  Myself, while I find the Greenskins amusing, I suspect I might have to move on and get serious with Dark Elves.

Anyway, enough for tonight.