About Me

Hi, I'm a software developer (or "tukang ngode") that is mostly interested in Android apps for now.

I started programming in 1999 in 8th grade first by doing batch scripts (if that can be called programming).

In 2000 I started to get absorbed by Visual Basic (starting from version 3, then 5, then 6 which I don't like 'cos the runtime library was not pre-installed on Windows 98), creating utility apps and selling them on the Internet without much success.

After 3 years, I became more and more agitated by the speed Visual Basic concatenate strings and the lack of efficient array types. When I was looking for alternative programming language, my priority is that it must be able to create GUI programs for Windows (since I and most of my friends aka testers use Windows), no runtime needs to be installed, and understandable (for me of course!) Then Euphoria become my daily food.

I like Euphoria for its flexibility and it was the first time I feel refreshed looking at a programming language that can be learned at its entirety in a few weeks, no hidden surprises, no huge libraries to learn, and every operation just seems so obvious, like there is only one way to do things. The syntax is also very consistent unlike VB.

I created a few apps using Euphoria to sell, for example Yahoo Message Archive Decoder which was successful (Thank God) for a single-man high school student like me.

The problem with Euphoria is that it doesn't support Unicode well, especially the Win32lib GUI library which assumes that a character is a byte for most of the operations (uses the "A" version of Win32 API). There were plans to evolve that, but it was abandoned at the end, since the library has become so huge and even the API are not so stable. Another big deficiency is Euphoria does not support pre-emptive multi-threading at all! Until the time of this writing (2010) it still does not.

During my university time (2003-2007) I learned Java more interestedly GUI (Swing) and threading, C and C++ (which I like but I don't really get into it since so many things have to be put on mind when developing practical apps), Java ME (which is nice but the fragmentation problem is unacceptable -- I didn't have enough money to buy enough handsets in the market), and get some trial on Python and Perl.

After graduation, I work on a company that puts me on control of almost everything -- from initial design architecture, managing the version control server, choosing a programming language and platform, and (sadly) QA and testing, documenting, etc. However I got to use C# which is a nicely designed language, but it is so tied to Microsoft platform and IDE that I don't feel refreshed. (One example of a nice piece of middleware using C# as a language only by removing Microsoft from the equation is Unity3D, that's great!)

Now the browser war is not as fierce as before, Linux fans are not so as aggressive as before, fast Internet is almost everywhere in the city, and for the last few years, war had not been greater in the mobile space. Apple's iPhone accelerates all handset manufacturers to release much more powerful hardware than ever, and mobile OSes are fighting for dominance.

Is it the proprietary iOS to dominate? Or is the too-lately-opensourced Symbian? Or the self-praised Windows Mobile 7 (as of the time of writing)? For me, Android seems to be the most promising, not only because it is full of kindness (free and quite open), but also they have designed the framework so elegantly from top to the bottom of the software stack. Now I'm doing Android development, I don't know what happen next, but I hope something beautiful comes.

As for Bible app, I intentionally devoted much time to building it, since I want the Word of God to be distributed as much as possible, and this is one of the way of saying thanks to God for He has given me ability to write computer programs.

Contact me at yukuku (a symbol) gmail (another symbol) com.

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Thanks to Yohanes Nugroho for building Symbian Bible (s60bible) app which motivates me doing the similar thing for Android. Thanks to har for building Indonesian Bible for iPhone which also motivates me. Thanks to all the testers and suggesters. I hope that the Bible applications we built be a blessing to people around the world.

Soli Deo Gloria - Glory to God Alone.