Wrapping Up 2013

This year I'm spending New Year's Eve in Montreal, Canada.  Since it's around -20C, I'm having a quiet night in and reflecting on the past year.  I already posted about the reading I did this year, but since posting a year-end summary has become a bit of a tradition for me I'll continue that in this post.

Travel
This is probably the first year I traveled more for work than I did for holidays, but the holidays were longer so it balanced out.  Here's where the year took me:

• UIUC, Urbana Champagne Illinois: March 2013
• Victoria: Memorial Day Weekend, 2013
• Ft Lauderdale, Florida: August 2013
• Purdue University, West Lafayette Indiana: Sept 10-12 2013
• Minneapolis: October 1-6 2013
• Vancouver: October 11-13 2013
• Iceland, France, and Monaco: Oct 17-Nov 1 2013
• Cobourg, Toronto, Barrie, and Montreal: Dec 25 2013 - Jan 2 2014

I wanted to go to Europe and back to Japan in 2013 but only made it to Europe.  For 2014 I'm really hoping to get back to Japan again, maybe even for New Year's!  But I'll be starting 2014 with a quick trip to Las Vegas.

Professional Life
This year was even busier than the last, and involved a switch of teams, so there was lots to do.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Attended this year's Grace Hopper Conference and worked on attendee engagement for my company
• Presented as part of a panel on mobile vs. web app development, an industry experience panel, and a Student Opportunity Lab on Careers in Test at GHC13
• Went on two College Campus Interview trips
• Had a highschool student job-shadow me for a day
• We shipped GDR3 for Windows Phone 8!

Blog
I've had bursts of activity on my blog with some droughts in between.  I try my best but it gets hard between my busy work and travel schedule as well as my hobbies and fitness schedule!  Here are the top five posts from my blog in 2013:

• How to Get Funding to Attend GHC
• Be a Communities Volunteer!
• Issues with Panorama TitleTemplate in Windows Phone 8
• GHC13 Panelists Needed for Testing Proposal
• Biology & Women in CS

Other
Outside of work and travel, I've continued playing Frisbee and climbing.  This year I tried out captaining for the first time, which was super fun!  I'm getting better at bouldering too and did my first V3-level routes this year.  I'm hoping to get some skiing in this spring.

At Musee d'Orsay in Paris, France this October

Announcing the Launch of "Where's My Game?"!

On Tuesday this week my first Windows Phone app, "Where's My Game?", was finally published.  If you play frisbee in the Greater Seattle region, this app is for you!  Here are a few things it will help you to do:

• for a given DiscNW league and team, see when and where your next game is (handy when on the go, since the desktop websites that host the schedules are hard to use from a smartphone)
• map your game and get directions from your current location (helpful if you're lost)
• see the DiscNW Twitter feed for any last minute cancellations/field changes

I've already submitted my first update which will add this summer's Microsoft Ultimate Hat League schedule, so if you work at Microsoft and play frisbee you can see your games and locations too.  That should be available later this week or early next (I'll make another announcement when it is).

In the coming weeks I'll add:

• the ability to save your favorite teams/leagues
• more dynamically loaded team schedules (so cancellations/rescheduled games appear faster)

Long term plans include creating a web service so groups can submit their own schedules.  That's a ways off, however.  For now, I hope you enjoy the app and find it useful!

Developing for Windows Phone 7

A quick update on my latest project: developing an app for Windows Phone.  One of my other pasttimes here in Seattle is playing Ultimate Frisbee (pretty frequently, too; I might play as much as four times a week in the summer).  However, if I'm on the go and need to figure out when and where my next game is, unfortunately the existing websites containing our schedules do not work well on mobile devices.  The text is small, I usually need to log in and navigate to several different pages before finding it, and forget about an easy way to see the map.  So, I decided to make an app for my phone that will do all this for me.  Here are some screen shots:


I've just submitted my app (last night, 10:30pm!) and am waiting for it to be approved for the Marketplace.  I'm planning to write a little more here about the different challenges I encountered and how I worked around them, so stay tuned!