Blog

It's been a while since I wrote last time. Not because nothing has happened during the last few months, just the opposite. The most important news is that - just a few days ago - I got a mortgage loan and bought a flat in Gliwice together with my girlfriend. Getting the loan was a nightmare and at some point I started feeling like I was living in Orwell's world. Seeing all the ignorance and incompetence of people working in the banks I'm no longer surprised that we have the so-called global economic crisis. Fortunately, with help of some other people, we managed to do it in the very last moment. I think from the perspective of time the difficulties will only make the satisfaction greater.

Of course there's still a lot to do: we must do some renovation, buy furniture and everything else from a TV to cups and spoons. We won't move in sooner than in the end of May. Our plans, however, go much further than that - we already booked holidays in Spain in September and bought tickets for the concert of U2 in August. So it should be a good compensation for all the sleepless nights.

Another good news is that I assembled a small team of developers and we started working on version 1.0 of WebIssues. All my open source projects that I've released so far had the major version of "zero", so reaching version "one" will be a very significant milestone. Also all of them were in fact one-person projects (with small occasional contributions from others) and it's the first time I'm working with a real team in the free software world (professionally I've been a team lead in various projects for almost two years). Anyway I think now it's the right time to do that.

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the mimec.org website; for the first time I didn't even have time to write the summary. What can I say; during the last few weeks my life basically turned upside down and everything indicates that it's going to stay this way :). After long searching and almost losing all hope, I finally found my significant other. I don't even have to say how much she changed everything in my life; most importantly, I can now start planning things rather than living from day to day like I had for a long time. I'm sure that the next year will bring a lot of changes.

Back to this year's summary; for my personal life it was a huge breakthrough; in other areas there were also successes, but honestly, nothing truly spectacular. For the first time I was officially the team lead in one of the largest projects in the company I work for; I was appreciated for "performing exceptionally well" and it was the "first release for which the deadline did not have to be changed and what was initially promised was delivered on time and on budget". Nice and encouraging words, without doubt; especially that it's not a very common thing in the world of software development. Yesterday's celebration with my team in a sushi restaurant was the reason I didn't write this post yesterday :).

Making the new version of Fraqtive was quite fun; it was downloaded 6,000 times and it's the fifth search result in Google for "open source fractal generator". Not bad. My recent Qt articles didn't receive any feedback so far, but had over 350 downloads, so I guess it's not very bad either. Work on WebIssues goes slowly, especially recently, for obvious reasons. The project had 3,000 downloads this year and won the contest which was supposed to be "a great platform to showcase code". Honestly I don't have a feeling that anyone has ever looked at it and that's too bad, because this project has a great potential, both in open source and commercial world, and I still can't find any serious opportunity to promote it. Next year I'm going to take a little bit more risk, because otherwise it doesn't really make any sense.

Oh how I just needed it! The good thing about having vacations in the second half of September is that you can make summer last a bit longer. The weather in the entire southern Europe was much more rainy than usually at this time, but it was still much, much better than in Poland. The result is that I came back very well tanned and obviously relaxed and full of energy. The city of Laganas located on the Zakynthos island was indeed a very nice place. I wouldn't recommend it if you prefer peaceful and quiet places, especially with all that young Englishmen having access to all-inclusive alcoholic drinks ;), but I personally don't mind it.

Just after returning, a few hours before the deadline, I made the final submission of WebIssues to the Qt Center Programming Contest. I want to make the final release of version 0.9.3 as soon as possible and immediately start working on the next version; there are a few cool ideas to put into life. Autumn and winter somehow make me more motivated to work on various things and to look for new opportunities, so I think that by the end of the year a lot of things may still go well.

It's quite a curious period now because last week I returned from Canada and in two weeks I'm going to Greece, so I'm spending more time abroad than here in Poland; which is obviously a good thing ;). So first a few words about the last trip. It was really great time for at least two reasons. First, I finally met all the guys I've been working with for the last three years. Second, seeing America for the first time is really an amazing experience. The scenery in Vancouver and Whistler is simply beautiful (when the weather is good). The variety of food styles was great, after all it's a very multicultural place. Besides I had a chance to taste a little bit of the "high life" - an exclusive hotel, houses worth millions of dollars, expensive cars and all that cool stuff that in Poland is still reserved mostly for gangsters :). Well, they've got the product and the market; they get the fruit. I have at least an honest satisfaction of well done job and feel a little bit ahead of my Hindi and Chinese competition ;). Besides I really appreciate the fact that I had a chance to be there.

Shortly after arriving back to Poland a girl that I've been seeing a few times told me that "we can be friends"; but that was actually a big step forward compared to the misery of the past two years. I'm using the online dating service simply because I don't have anywhere else to look, but I'm not really convinced that it's a good place for me. Let's be honest, it's a goddamn marketplace; and it's the XXI century, so nobody cares too much about the contents, it's all about the packaging. And I realize that's not my strongest attribute. It's not that I have a low self-esteem, actually my personal opinion is quite different, but the extrapolation of the past experiences seem to well confirm that. Or did I just take a wrong sample of the population? :>

So now it's time to work a little bit, in the meantime releasing another beta version of WebIssues, and then finally have some vacation from work. I'm going with my friends to a Greek island Zakynthos, a four-star hotel, maybe not as exclusive as the one in Vancouver, but at least it's all-inclusive :). So it's gonna be just two weeks of doing nothing except eating and drinking, and trying to relax; that's what I need most now.

I published the third (and for now the last) Qt article, called Modern Qt style for Windows. It's a Qt style for Windows modifying the look of toolbars, menus and some other components, resembling MS Office 2003 and some .NET applications. In WebIssues I originally used a customized version of the DotNetStyle, which was recently published as a Qt Solutions component. For Fraqtive I created a new style written almost completely from the beginning. Now I removed the remaining GPL-ed code copied from the DotNetStyle component and relicensed the entire code to a BSD-style license, allowing to use it in both GPL-ed and commercial applications. Note that this style is written specifically for needs of WebIssues and Fraqtive. There is no warranty that it will be suitable for all applications without modifications. Of course suggestions of improvements and bug reports are as always welcome.

Shortly I will release a new version of Fraqtive including the current version of this style and some other minor UI improvements. I'm also finishing refactoring the WebIssues code and I soon I will start implementing some new features, so if everything goes well, a beta release will be available in the beginning of August. Then I'm going for a week to Vancouver. It's a business trip, because I work on a project for a Canadian company, but I will also have some time to rest and visit some nice places in the area, so I'm impatiently looking forward to it :).