Hung Truong: The Blog!

Graphing My Cycling Progress on Strava and Automating With Zapier

Since I moved to a new home that’s closer to work, I’ve been riding my bike to commute at least a few times each week. My commute to work is very easy as it’s almost completely downhill. I pay for it on the way back, though. I’ve been trying to get healthier, so commuting with my bike has definitely become a priority. In addition to having fun, I’d also like to motivate myself to ride more often and push myself to get better at it (especially the uphill part).

Impressions of Android Wear (LG G Watch) with my Nexus 5

I finally got the LG G watch that I won in a contest about a week ago. I replaced my Pebble smart watch with the Android Wear device along with using my spare Nexus 5 instead of my iPhone. It’s been about four days or so since I made the switch so I thought I’d write up my impressions.

Android Wear Design Contest!

Last week I went to a GDG Ann Arbor Android meetup on Android Wear. The presentation was set up by Google and had a bunch of information on the upcoming Android Wear SDK. At the end, it was announced that there would be a few vouchers for Android Wear devices available. A design contest was announced and the deadline was set at Sunday.

Being naturally competitive and really into new technology, I made a design mockup for a home automation app that I thought would be useful to have on a wearable device (the most common form factor happens to be a watch). Here’s my submission that I originally posted to Google Plus:

Inspecting and Debugging API Versions with Runscope

This past month at FarmLogs, we implemented a versioning scheme for our internal API. API versioning is often a difficult transition to make, especially if you’re using a third party API and dealing with deprecations (Facebook, I’m looking at you!). It’s often a chore to figure out exactly what has changed between API versions unless you have very good documentation.

Coincidentally, Runscope also has a service called API Changelog that can send you notifications when a third party API changes. Luckily for me, any changes to our internal API were subject to review by our team of engineers, so if I had any questions or concerns, I could bring them up in person. Even so, when dealing with a changing API, the truth is in the response, not necessarily the documentation (or Hipchat or Hackpad). For a while, I was updating the iOS client to the new version by copying and pasting the two responses into a text editor and looking at the differences. About halfway through I remembered that this functionality is built into Runscope, so I started using that. I’ll show you how to compare diffs of two responses so you don’t have to waste half of your time like me!

Ideas and Recipes For Home Automation With The Internet of Things

A few weeks ago my friend Emily asked me to speak at the Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire for their speaker series. I said “sure” and figured I’d talk about something like app development or design. I ended up picking a more “Maker Faire-y” topic since I thought it would work better for the crowd.

I’ve been really getting into home automation and buying a lot of “internet of things” products lately. I decided to do an introductory talk on home automation along with ideas on how people can get up and running quickly. I did the talk last weekend and had a great turnout. Some people asked for more information so I thought I’d write up a blog post that more or less summarized the talk. So here it is!