Moments to keep

meskio on 12 Jan 2014

Winter Break of Code, Day Six

A lot of great memories will stay with me after this intense week. The house surrounded by palm trees, people with computers in every corner, laying down on a sofa, chatting on the balcony, and sitting down on the carpet. The surf and hiking breaks on this astonishing Kauai’s landscape, sharp mountains covered by forests falling into beaches of fine sand and fun waves. The nights spiced with Moxie’s tasty cocktails and long deep conversations about the meaning of life, the internet and everything.

Northern sea cliffs of Kauai from the Na Pail Coast trail

It’s interesting to have in the same room designers, web developers, and Android developers. Everybody works on different things and has a different perspective on the project. To listen to the conversations about privacy preserving protocols, the sensations that colors transmit, how to place information on a web page. I’m learning a lot from the people at the WBoC.

Meskio and others working in the living room at Winter Break of Code

For this week I’ve being working on Zones, migrating it to OpenStreetMap, and fixing AT&T MMS problems on TextSecure.

OpenStreetMap will free Zones from revealing your location to Google and depending on proprietary software, bringing in collaboratively created open maps. The OSM integration is working, but it still has a lot of rough edges and missing functionality that Zones had with Google Maps. I hope to be able to have it ready to merge in the coming days.

Screenshot of Zones map displaying user-defined polygons.

The AT&T problem is being frustrating, expending days on trying random things to find out where the problem comes from. I think I’m starting to understand how MMS works on AT&T, but I’m still not sure if I have a solution to that problem.

Even though I didn’t finish (yet) my main objectives for the week, I’m pretty happy of the week. I have learned about Android, OSM and I can now surf one out of 20 waves I try.

meskio

Kauai, Hawaii

12 January 2014