Coder B – Balamuthu's Blog

Logo for CodersB

Happy New Year to everyone. I know it’s late and I have not blogged a single post since August 2017. This is my first post of this year, so Happy New Year 2018!

I own a website named CodersB.com where I showcase the apps I create at home. CodersB doesn’t have a logo, so thought of designing one on my own with my half baked skills. 🙂

I’m not good at drawing or designing and only know a few basic graphic techniques. I like Bees, Bears and Hexagons, so tried those design but none of them came out well. I will try a few more designs with Bears until I give up and ask for some experts help. Until then, Instead of having the drafts locked on my computer, I decided to share it in my blog so the effort don’t go waste.

Here we go.

CodersB – B for Bear. A bear that codes 😉

Let me know what you think. Appreciate any ideas!

Enterprise Architect

I’m an Application Architect who is in pursuit to become an Enterprise Architect. While looking for an opportunity to learn and grow in career, I came across the Open Group Enterprise Architecture certificate program (TOGAF). I was preparing for this exam on and off for several months until I decided to focus dedicatedly for the last few weeks. I finally attended the Togaf Part 1 exam and cleared it today.

This is foundation level and I need to prepare and pass one more exam to be Togaf certified.

I would like to share the list of my preparation materials so it will be helpful for someone who stumble up on my website.

Book: Togaf 9 Foundation Study Guide: 3rd Edition by Rachael Harrison.

If you are like me who prefers paperback over pdf, you can buy it in Amazon. The book also has sample questions.

Video course: Become an Enterprise Architect with TOGAF 9.1 Part 1 by Scott Duffy – Udemy.com

I bought this course from Udemy.com and the tutor makes it simple to understand.

Going through the video course and the entire book helped me pass the exam.

Before I start to prepare for the Togaf part 2 exam, I would take a small break and spend sometime to create a tiny / silly app for Apple Watch. 🙂

I hope to become a successful Enterprise Architect in near future.

Finish

Me and my wife have finally completed the reminder app. It is called Finish.

Thanks to my wife for helping me in learning a new programming language and working with me on this app. We published it for free. It neither has ads nor In-App purchases.

It is now available on iOS App Store.

About the app:

Finish is a simple reminder app which has very minimal but required features. There are tons of To-do and reminder apps in the market, but this one focuses on a simple todo list with lovely interface. We wanted it to be easy to set a reminder date and time. Other apps would take multiple scrolls and swipes to choose a future month and year. This one requires only a few taps to choose any month of any year.

We have referred many user interface and worked on several designs to reach this point. Here’s a screenshot of app.

I hope someone from one corner of the world will like this app 🙂

I am also working on a new website for this. It is codersb.com.

It feels good to finish something 🙂

What’s happening?

It has been 2 months since I blogged. What was I doing all these days ??

Remember? I wanted to create a reminder app and posted a mock up design ? Yes, I was totally focusing on it and nearing to complete the initial version.

I have named it as Finish. I will tell more once I publish the app.

Swift – A new programming language

I wanted to create an iOS app which I have described in this post. Being a C# programer, it was so hard to learn Objective C, especially with the unusual syntax.

Look at what it takes to create an instance of a class in Objective-C.

ClassName *instanceName = [[ClassName alloc] init];

Seriously? Allocate and Initialize? Do I need to tell each and everything to it? There are too many square brackets to deal with.

Unlike me, my wife was so comfortable and picked it up real quick. She laughs at me when I complain!!

Luckily, in a month, Apple had announced its new programing language Swift for iOS and OS X. I felt like Apple heard me 😉

It is a developer friendly language and let programmers focus on logic than complex syntax.

Now look at how to instantiate a class in Swift…

var instanceName = ClassName()

No semicolons required at end of each line 🙂 It is simple and easy to code. Learn more about Apple’s Swift from their website.

I have started to learn and hope to be an expert soon.

Happy Coding!!

Reminder App

I decided to create a reminder app for IOS. This is not a unique idea, but I just wanted to create an app and learn a language required for it.

It is so regretful that I haven’t learnt anything new for the past few years. I don’t want to be stagnated with the knowledge that will be legacy soon. So I chose to upgrade my skills to match the phone, tablet and desktop ecosystem.

There are several ways to learn a new language, I like to start developing an app and learn it on the go. Learning cocoa is more tougher than I thought, I hope I’ll grab things quick.

Why Reminder app?
I don’t know, I was talking to my friend and he wants me to remind him about something and when I opened the iOS 7 reminder app, I felt like the native app isn’t that good. Functionally, it does a great job, but I think the usability isn’t good enough.

So, I decided to start creating a reminder app with a new UX design. There are tons of reminder apps on the App Store which is so cool, but still I wanted to create a yet another app that is available in the market 🙂

I will post my progress frequently! Happy learning and coding!