Love this. Enjoyed riding your train of thought from challenge conception through each performance pass to the final form. Surprisingly fun to play around with this sim too. Looking forward to more posts!
I built (yet another) app to explore coronavirus cases.
Last March, when the virus craziness was exploding, I had built mobile apps with the same functionality, but both Apple and Google refused to accept my app unless it was backed by an official medical or government org. (Google even gave my developer account a strike...jeez). So I turned around and converted it into a web app.
If you're interested, the API that powers the app is available publicly [0]. Time series data is also available, which I plan to add to the app soon.
If you get a chance to check it out I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks for stopping by!
Yes, it's crazy how fast things change in this space. I still use a Nexus 5X (running Maru of course) as my daily driver, but by today's standards it is ancient. It is a challenge to keep up with the new hardware when you are not a fan of the "let's just buy a new phone every 2 years" mentality. But that's just the way the market rolls right now and we've got to cope with it.
I must say that being at the mercy of so many moving targets makes me nervous sometimes because you never know when Google or some phone manufacturer is going to pull the rug under you. It is already a challenge to keep porting Maru to the latest Android version since the internal APIs can change a lot. To combat this, we are stringent about keeping our modifications to the bare minimum; of course we want to provide a good experience though, and we have to think hard about whether the maintenance burden of a feature is worth it. If we owned more of the stack, we could likely do a lot more without fear of future breakage nightmares. But the truth is, it was only because we could piggyback off of Android and commodity phones that we were able to get Maru built with minimal investment.
That being said, we are continuing to improve our process so we can support the latest and greatest phones since our current velocity is frankly way too slow. We've been investing in automation a lot (continuous builds, documentation, etc.) to free up cycles. Another thing is, we are open-source, and I think the critical factor to boost Maru's velocity is making sure our developer community has the knowledge, support, and tooling to pitch in without fear. Crowdsourcing the development effort is the only way we can keep up in the long run!
Sad to hear this. I was excited that an established company like Samsung was pursuing the idea of using your phone as a PC, but looks like the ROI wasn't there for them.
Fortunately, you can always come check out Maru OS [0] if you want to turn your phone into a PC. We launched in early 2016 as one of the very first projects to ride the "convergence" wave created by Ubuntu's (failed) Edge project. After this news, I guess we are the only serious project still in active development. Anyways, we're open-source and have an enthusiastic user and developer community that is always happy to welcome new members! (I am the creator)
How do we even detect these bloody endocrine disruptors? I have no idea which things in my environment are leaking this stuff. Perhaps pie in the sky, but it would be awesome to have something like a geiger counter for endocrine disruptors.
I think we can all agree that we want to maximize the quality of our work, where quality is defined as how well our work satisfies our goal. Typically, the discussion is around speed vs. quality, but I think quality itself encompasses speed (time_to_market below):
Came across this talk a few weeks ago and I have to say this is one of the best pragmatic talks comparing non-FP vs. FP paradigms I've ever seen. I really like your example problem, how you explore state and mutation in the different paradigms, and how you refactor step-by-step towards a functional design. Thank you!
Love ASCII art! I even use it on my blog [0]. I write all my posts in Markdown and it's pretty sweet to be able to see and edit diagrams in-line with the rest of the post.
I'm still looking for an ASCII art editor to make it more pleasant to draw though. So far, I like the default styles in Asciio [1] the best.