Newsletter #10 - June 2019 (Patreon)

It's that time of the year again... those that have been around since last year know the drill by now, but for those that are new here or haven't caught the drift yet: it's summer holiday!

For those that don't know it yet: my day-job consists of developing a wide variety of network-related applications for use in the educational sector.

This ranges from more complex projects like certified software for taking graded tests down to simple helper tools that teaching staff can use to make their daily life in IT easier. To add on top of that, I also work a second day-job in an IT-security firm to fund the on-going construction of our new home.

Now you might ask "Okay, but what does this mean exactly?" so, let me fill you in.

Due to our company's link to the educational system of our country, and the fact that said system is owned pretty much entirely by the state, we have to get by on what little tax money the state awards us.

This budget has been growing slimmer and slimmer over the last 5 years and one of the first things that was cut to keep operational costs down was our dedicated test environment for big-scale testing.

Given 90% of the software produced by our company is big-scale networking software (which often handles a lot of mission-critical data), we've found ourselves struggling to do reliable big-scale testing of said software.

In response to that I've made a suggestion to my superior: Offer certain schools / universities reduced prices for full-time on-site support in exchange for explicit permission to use their live environment for big-scale testing during known downtimes.

The idea was quickly turned into action, and ever since then it has become somewhat of a unwritten rule to delay big-scale testing until summer, or rather, summer holiday, when the facility is unoccupied.

This is the main reason why the summer months are the most silent around here (on my Patreon), as its our company's only window of opportunity to actually get things prepared / tested / bugfixed for our annual autumn software release schedule.

On another note, some of you might have picked up on the previous public Patreon post I've made concerning the Xiaomi Mi Max 3 and the recent bring-up of fully working device & vendor trees for custom ROM development on it.

I've been thinking of following up on this idea of taking in under-appreciated (but decent) budget devices of all sorts (phones, tablets, handheld gaming devices) and up-cycle them to be the best they can.

Would you guys like this idea?

With the (regular / CleanROM) XD+ work being (more or less) done by now, and the Android 9 port for it being a (very) long-term project with a lot of hurdles to overcome, it could help keep the Patreon flowing with fresh content without taking too much time away from the XD+ Android 9 port.

As a reference point: creating, testing & publishing of the Xiaomi Mi Max 3 work took me no longer than a week (3 work days).

Sure, not every new project will be this smooth, but I figure that a estimated ballpark of 2-3 weeks (~9 work days) for the tougher ones would be a realistic measure next to my 2 day-jobs.

So, what do you guys think?

Should I branch out a little bit and provide you guys with a wider set of content?

Or would you prefer me to "settle down and not worry about giving timely updates" and instead focus my entire spare-time and attention into the Android 9 port for the GPD XD+?

Let me know what you guys think in the comments and enjoy your summer holiday!

As always, I will keep you guys posted!

- Black-Seraph