Why I chose to call my blog this way.

I've been interested in learning new stuff, especially technologies, since I was in elementary school. I remember myself building a fake "Super Computer" off of a large cardboard box and my mother's old mechanical typewriter. Back then, I remember I wanted a computer really badly but my family couldn't afford to buy one so I builded one just for playing. A computer is not the only thing that I have built, I also remember building robots many times. Or was it just the casing? In fact it had nothing in common with a real robot except its overall look. Much like my "Super Computer" which also had nothing in common with a real computer but hey it was lot of fun playing with these "toys" and mimic'ing high tech toys.

Later on, when I started studying Computer Science in school, I finally got myself a computer, and later I got several computers actually. And today, I got other gadgets too but I never got any robots... probably because I think robots are lame...

For the longest time I wanted to learn 2 things: Web Programming and Mobile Programming. Problem is, I can never decide whichever I would like to learn the most. I spent some time learning Objective C, PHP and Java. The result: nothing! It would take too much of my time to write both an iPhone and an Android version of the same program + the Web Service End Points (RESTful interface) that the clients would connect to to fetch the actual data. It would be so great because in the end I would know all that stuff but I'd takes months and I would not have time to ski, bike, etc.

The Change
Then I got hired by Macadamian, they made me realized a few things:

• It is very important and beneficial for my career to learn knew stuff (OK, that I knew, duh) and it also serves the company.
• Whenever you learn new stuff, might as well share the knowledge: "Why don't you blog what you learn"?
• You could do HTML5, CSS3 and JS (yep AJAX stuff) on a Mobile Platform.
• There is this new trend out there: it's called OpenData

Wow, this is great! Now I know that I want to learn Mobile and Web development, I know I can do both simultaneously, I know I could write OpenData software for the community and I also know that I want to blog about it. So what's missing?

So far, I have:

• a Language: HTML5, CSS3 and JS
• a platform: Mobile
• a field of interest: OpenData

The Missing Link

Last Friday, while I was in a meeting at Macadamian, I learned about this (new?) Open Source Mobile Framework: PhoneGap. I got very excited about it, Googled it and immediately got very interested in to trying it out. Among the dozen things I look up on the internet every day, that one I thought I should remember it and later spend more time trying it out.

Later on the same day (or maybe it's over the weekend?), it occur to me that, to start putting together this blog, all that was missing was a framework (this PhoneGap thingy actually). I should combine all 4 items (HTML5/CSS3/JS, Mobile, OpenData and PhoneGap) and share my experiments with it.

This morning, I finally downloaded the framework (zipped up). Just one more zip file on my hard drive along with the other half a million other zip files that I have downloaded just to give it a try! The zip file got onto my hard drive and got uncompressed immediately, I was too curious to see what was in there :-).

And, again today, at lunch time I registered on blogspot with this account: http://phonegap.blogspot.com

This is the beginning of my blog.