This is a challenge to my future 2015 self, for the City to Surf 12km run. Beat this!

Just passed the Christadelphian Meeting Hall on my nightly run. JESUS WILL BE KING ON EARTH.

As his body left the bus, and his foot struck the pavement, time slowed. His thoughts went immediately to the unknown man and he dreaded the unintelligible call “G.. y.. b.. i.. h…”, like a gong mechanically sounding the impending end of the world. The unknown man always appeared the same; raggedy unwashed hair, unshaven, old dirty clothing. His thoughts moved away from the unknown man, and he headed for the gate.

PhotoArchive version 1.3 is now available. With version 1.3 you can now easily archive to your home storage and your cloud (Google Drive) storage.

Google recently lowered the price of their monthly storage plans making it extremely cheap to have an active (not cold like Amazon S3 Glacier Storage) offsite backup of your irreplaceable memories, your photos & videos.

I was out running early this morning, and RunKeeper had just finished coldly relating the facts of my run performance so far. I wasn’t doing great, but in my defence I was sore from the full-body workout the day before.

I take a lot of photos & videos with my iPhone. It’s always with me, so it’s convenient, and the quality is good. My DSLR body and lenses produce superior quality, but are usually left at home gathering dust.

When I take new photos or videos, often of my family, I worry that if something were to happen to my iPhone, those irreplaceable memories will be lost forever.

There are many solutions for this need, for example iCloud Backup, the Dropbox app, or the Amazon Cloud Drive app, but they all have varying costs and limitations. I wanted a simple solution for me, and that’s why I decided to build an app as a side project - PhotoArchive for iPhone. When released, PhotoArchive will be free for everyone on the App Store.

I read a tweet from Luke Wroblewski this morning, which lead to a blog post he published on November 7, 2012 called Mobile Design Details: Hide/Show Passwords.

The fact that I have to manually enter passwords on mobile has been a constant source of frustration for me, with this only making it worse. Sadly his advice has not caught on much with app/site designers and developers. I decided to see how hard it was to quickly implement on iOS with a few thoughts along the way.

In January 2013 I wanted to try something different, and decided to try running as I had never been a runner. In February I wrote a short story called Running, and then went on to write a few more blog posts during the year related to Running.

While I was doing all this writing, I ran a total of 529.3 kilometers, for 53 hours, and burned 51,578 calories, which is about 25 days worth of food for an adult (based on 2,000 calories a day).

What?! You’re building an awesome mobile app, like this one - iOS 7 Dynamic Type, and iOS 7 UserXListView, and get to the point where you need a backend. Oh no! Your complexity just increased exponentially.

Luckily the latest cloud computing XaaS (Everything as a service) is called a BaaS (Backend as a service). BaaS offerings include Parse (which was acquired by Facebook earlier this year), and the open source BaasBox. The idea is that a BaaS abstracts the complexity of building a backend.

But is building a backend really all that difficult using cloud computing? Let’s find out and build a cloud backend using node.js on AWS. Let’s get started.

I received a message on May 7, 2013 that turned into a short lesson about differences, with a rather funny ending. I saved a photo of the conversation and still think about it even now.