Small update to follow-up the official HabitCat public release. The app is now also available on iOS, worldwide and for free 😁.

Get it right now!

Again I want to cheer the people at Expo for making it that easy to target the whole phone market, releasing on iOS wasn't our plan until just a few days ago because we thought that would be too much work for a small side project like this one, but in fact that only required a few tweaks and manual operations.

So we are now done with the release on mobile, and done with the first version of the application, we reached all our goals and even more. A very successful project so far (not in term of users of course, but that's not our main motivation to work on this)!

And please, if you try the app, continue to give us feedbacks on Twitter or by email, we will follow-up with updates to take in account user comments 🤗.

I had a very cool surprise today while checking my GitHub profile. Some projects I contributed to have been selected to included to be part of the Arctic Code Vault project, and I am officially an Arctic Code Vault Contributor!

That made me chuckle, and I now have a nice little badge under my contact info.

Though to be honest my contributions are really just simple corrections and fixes that I regularly do to projects I'm using or reading about. Not the majestic legacy some people would imagine when they hear of a project like this one!

But hey, people in 10k years will be able to blame me for a specific typo I made, isn't that great? 😁 (if they can figure out how to use git, which isn't something I would bet on).

Update 17/07/2020

Blog post discussed on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23871126

As a half of the team at NoodleSoup, I'm more than pleased to announce the public release of HabitCat, a simple mobile app to manage habits and routines. We created it to fullfil our own needs, and as a way to scratch our own itch as product developers.

It's use is really straightforward:

1. Create a habit with a weekly goal
2. Mark days as successful or not
3. Keep your streak of successful weeks

It's just you, your habits, and a cute little cat. Our goal was to have something straightforward, without notifications, advertising, or reliance on online services.

It has been made with the fantastic tools and services from Expo (I love what they are doing, highly recommended!) in 2-3 months while we experimented and learnt to use...

A few days ago Youtube's algorithm had a small surprise for me. I had decided to do a simple project logo in 3D using Blender, somehow the suggestion algorithm picked that fact and started to list videos of people documenting their progress doing 3D content, such as this really cool progress report from Hendy August:

Hendy's progress as seen in the video is impressive, and the scene he created and showcase at the end talked to me. That motivated me enough to look for tutorals to better get started with the software as I was failing to get any good results for my project logo.

The last time I actually used Blender was ~10 years ago when I had friends who were quite serious and skilled at making 3D creations, that picked my interest and I spent some time learning how to use the software, though I didn't go that far. I can still remember how confusing video tutorials (or written tutorials) where at the time, with terrible audio, low resolution, and in general instructions that wer...

I decided to organize my thoughts, ideas, and projects a bit, they are currently spread around GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, and multiple computers and (physical) notebooks. As part of this move I'm creating this website and blog that will be available at a domain I control: sam.elborai.me.

I plan to use it as a personal tool, a place where I can share current thoughts and ideas, easily find past ones, centralize documentation and showcase of some projects, and see my progression, learning and general improvement over time.

Some projects will surely seem silly, some blog posts will feel written by a complete beginner or not bring value. That’s expected. The main audience of this site is myself, it is my personal place where I’m free to share what I want, at my own rhythm.

Let’s see how this project evolves 😁.