Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Learning new skills


I got my first computer when I was 12, that was a mind whopping 26 years ago. This was a love at first sight, although I wanted a completely different computer than my parents would allow. I got an Apple //c computer, with practically no games available as these computers were mostly used in academia and business. I did get a few games though, but this wasn't a Commodore 64.

I am glad now that I got an Apple instead of Commodore 64. For one, I could easily write both uppercase and lowercase letters at the same time, I had 80x25 lines of text. I could very easily write all my school projects in Apple Works and Apple Writer and print them out. I had Print Shop by Brøderbund software, so I could do banners. I had a printer even. But first and foremost, I got a world class Basic programming language, for free, completely free. It was just there. Boot from any floppy and you had Basic. You had to list files on that disk, you had to do that in Basic. I never knew this was Microsoft basic until much later. But since you don't have many games, you play with the computer in order to play with the computer, that is become a computer a nerd.

I got pretty good by myself, and taught myself to program, when I was 12, completely by myself.

Ever since that time, I keep up. I am constantly learning new things and getting better. Even as I am closing in the dreaded four o (40), I still am learning new things all the time.

Best way in my mind to learn something new is to make something. Now, I don't have many ideas, but there is usually always something, something you yourself need. A few years back, I searched for a way to merge a few pdf documents. The government in Iceland gives out a paper, both old fashioned and in pdf with all legal things. Companies foreclosures, bankruptcies, legal agreements and such boring stuff, boring for most, but it can be fun reading this. Problem, the documents are quite small, and come out quite frequently, sometimes 2-3 times a week. But when you want to search these documents you could not (this was before Spotlight and Windows Search got good). So to merge all these documents was a pain.

So when I decided to learn Play framework and learn Javascript, I thought, why not make this into a web service, free with ads on the page. So I made mergepdfs.com, with asynchronous uploads, which means, just drop a file into the page, and it gets uploaded given it has the correct meta tags. Then just click on 1 button and it would download the results automatically. Sounds simple, well not that much. But I did make it, and with a Jquery plugin for file uploads, I did make it. I am quite proud of this site.

This is a totally free service, meaning you make your merged document for $0. There are no up sells, no limitations. I am happy with it, and will be releasing a new version real soon, with some more Jquery stuff. Technologies used, Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Jquery, blueimp file upload,Play Framework and everything runs on a powerful Intel i5 Linux box.

I just can't explain it but single page web apps, are super cool.


Links :


and finally the website itself :


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