A PERSONAL HISTORY

Once Upon
a Time

A museum of some of the things I've built and created over the years.

Image generated by Midjourney · Prompt: kid with curly brown hair dreaming of software development --v 4

Once upon a time, a curious young boy was amazed by his uncle showing him a lunar lander game on an Apple II. The boy asked many questions. How does it work? How does it know to fire the boosters when I press the key?

The uncle showed the code behind the game and patiently explained the inner workings. The boy wanted to know more. That boy was me, and that was the moment I became enamored of software development. Back then, there was no iPhone or game console, and I didn't know it could become a job or people would be paid to build software. I was fascinated, and my passion was born.

Decades later, I'm still curious and as passionate as that day. In this little corner of the internet I'll list a few things I've built and created over the years. Most of the work I perform nowadays is building private apps for enterprises. Below you will find a few of the websites that I kept around for posterity.

— Daniel Wanja
1996–2002

Prodesign Sàrl

I started my second company in 1996 called Prodesign Sàrl in Switzerland. Back then I was doing Microsoft and Borland Delphi development. I dabbled with NeXT development too. As you can see, 30 years later I'm still coding and loving every moment of it.

NeXT logo
Prodesign Sàrl screenshot
2005–2012

OnRails.org

I fell into Ruby on Rails thanks to my good friend Lee Marlow. As I was learning and discovering new things about Rails, I wanted to share them with the world. I started a blog called OnRails.org. I also wrote about things I was learning in other languages and frameworks, like Flex and Adobe AIR. I ended up writing over two hundred articles on the site.

OnRails.org screenshot
2008–2009

Flex On Rails

  • Flex On Rails, the book, was published on January 5, 2009.
  • Flex On Rails, the website, is the home of Daniel's and Tony's hub for everything related to using Adobe AIR and Flex with Ruby On Rails.
  • We also gave a Flex On Rails talk at RailsConf 2008 (June 1st, 2008) in Portland, Oregon.
  • And I was scheduled to give a talk at Adobe Max 2008 called Flex with Ruby Rails. This was however delegated to the Unconference but Adobe graciously gave me all the perks of a speaker that year.
Flex On Rails screenshot
2009

AppsDen.com

During the first 360iDev Conference in Denver organized by my friend John Wilker, I created my first iPhone app called "My-Fi" and put it on the App Store during that conference. I went on to create FuzzyClock, at its peak, which was number 22 in the lifestyle section of the App Store.

AppsDen.com screenshot

Screencasts from the past - 2008 to 2012

Here are some 14 screencast I did a long time ago.

Testing Flex Apps with Cucumber

I was playing with Cucumber and FunFx to drive a Flex application and it's really cool and created this screencast to show how this all works together. The first 5 minutes I build a Restfulx scaffolded Flex application. The following 5 minutes I configure the Flex app with FunFx, which is required to be able to drive the app from Cucumber. Then the main part which is 20 minutes of creating three cucumber scenarios that drives the Flex application. Check it out.

July 08, 2009 • 15595 plays
Testing Flex Apps with Cucumber
Dashcode 3.0 - An IDE to build HTML apps for iPad, iPhone and Safari

A quick demo on how to build a HTML iPhone app using DashCode 3.0

May 10, 2010 • 8815 plays
Dashcode 3.0 - An IDE to build HTML apps for iPad, iPhone and Safari

Thanks for visiting

If you made it this far, you're a real trooper 🙏. Thanks for taking this trip down memory lane with me!