You'll have noticed I haven't updated much recently. Even when I did, if was with distinctly non-tech stuff. The reason being I've been busy. Not "I've got a big to-do list" busy or "I've had a couple of browser tabs open for a few weeks that I'll get round to eventually" busy, either. I've got a text-file to-do list that's been open, unsaved in the background since January 2017 and there are a couple of background tabs I've been meaning to get round to reading since late 2014. Really.

What's been keeping me busy?

Easy answer: HERE Tracking.

A couple of years back, a few of us got interested in how IoT devices could work with location. What's the smallest, simplest device we can connect to the cloud and pin point on a map? Within a few weeks, we had a basic cloud and at CES in January this year, we launched a fully-fledged product. In that time, I've moved from 'prototyper who built version 0.1 on his laptop during the Christmas holidays' to something roughly equivalent to CTO of a medium-sized tech company. Not bad.

What's it do?

In essence, a small IoT device with some combination of GSM, WiFi and Bluetooth does a scan to find out what wireless networks, Bluetooth beacons and cell towers are visible and how strong they appear. They send their scan to HERE Tracking where it gets resolved into a latitude/longitude and then saved. The best bit is that it works indoors and outdoors.

Look, we've even got our own shiny video with cheesy voiceover!

And another that shows what it actually does!

There are a bunch of other features as well such as geofences, notifications, filtering, etc. but the main focus is this large-scale ingestion and storage of data.

At this point, our original Tracking team has grown to include HERE Positioning (the clever people who actually figure out where the devices are) and HERE Venues (we recently acquired Micello). By combining, the Tracking, Positioning and Venues bits together, we can follow one of these devices from one factory, across the country on a truck or train, overseas, into another country, into another factory, out into a shop... and so on.

For reasons that this margin is too narrow to contain, I don't have the time to maintain a lot of my open source projects now.

I don't like to abandon them, however. I should have probably done this a few months ago but better late than never.

I'm looking for someone to take over Hardy and csste.st.

Hardy

https://github.com/thingsinjars/Hardy

Automated CSS testing framework. Back when I used to do CSS for a living, I got interested in the concept of visual regression testing. Not finding the right tool for what I had in mind, I built Hardy. It was quite popular for a while but has been quite neglected for about a year for various reasons. The main reason being that I don't actually write CSS any more. Well, not for a living. The tool worked for me while I needed it and when I didn't, I stopped updating it.

If anybody would like to take over the project and keep it going, get in touch.

csste.st

https://github.com/thingsinjars/csstest

This was supposed to be a community-driven collection of information about CSS testing - tools, techniques, tutorials, etc. I'd love it if it could continue like that but I had a difficult time keeping up my enthusiasm after the umpteenth demand from some "CSS testing as a service" start-up founder demanding a favourable write-up. Quite a few of these founders also wanted some kind of guarantee that I would continue to maintain Hardy for free so they could build a business model around selling it.

Again, if anyone has ideas for how to take the project forward, let me know.

---

I'm going to renew the domains hardy.io and csste.st for another year to see if I can find maintainers but after that, I'll retire them if I haven't found any.