Test of the Crayon (TotC)
Test of the Crayon
You know those things you did as a kid when your buddy dared you to or called you out and you ended up doing something completely out of the norm for you? Yeah, well, you’re visiting this page because of one of those things.
Most of you (if you regularly visit this site) can see that I spend a lot of time in the systems administration realm. Sure, that means exposures to scripting, a little “code” every now and then, etc. The bulk of my time, however, is spent working on cloud deployments, server issues, software/service issues and so on (go read my resume if you want more), but I don’t really dive into the whole dev world. It crossed my mind a couple of times but each time I had looked at it, I just didn’t find much love for the idea of dealing with what came with it.
Enter this friend of mine… oh and by the way he doesn’t get named because he’s a pain in the rear and he’s gloating right now. Anyway, enter this friend… who is a developer (surprise) is telling me about modern IDEs and how it’s as easy as scripting in most cases, blah blah you get the point. Anyway, he makes a reference to it being as easy as ‘ color by number ‘ if I wanted to learn how to do it. The usual banter of ‘nah, I’ll pass’ and a retort back eventually turns into what equates to those childhood dares. Well, welcome to my dare. The “Test of the Crayon” (color by number).
I started in on this with one goal in mind, to take the challenge and make something… but what!? Well, wouldn’t ya know it, the Rocket.Chat server I had running as a test (while looking for alternatives to Slack, Teams, etc. for maintaining proprietary intellectual property enclosed within our own sphere of control) has an option for whitelabeling their app. How hard could it be right? 🙂
So… this entire process how now turned from a ‘can you actually get it to build’ to ‘can you actually go through the entire process and publish it’ scenario. Actually it’s been quite fun and I’ve currently got the app pending with the Apple Store. So this page? It’s my ‘support’ page for my app.
That being said, I doubt anyone is going to find a use for this thing other than me and some colleagues who are using this rocket chat server internally but the fun behind this entire experience is actually worth writing about from a sys admins point of view. There’s a lot involved in the process of building out an app which actually enlightening. Look at that, I found something to blog about I guess.
So sit back, relax and wait the next few months for me to post a blog about my entire experiences with this whole endeavor on my main page. Oh yeah, and if you did download my app and are using it… it’ll work against any Rocket.Chat server but your notifications won’t work since it’s using their whitelabel process which basically binds notifications to my specific certs/keys on my firebase and apple push notification configurations. I highly recommend you continue to use the official version unless you’re running your own server and are just tuning in to see how I did it.
More to come!
Travis
PS. I’ll probably still never create my own app from scratch, but this has still been kinda fun. 😀
