Elija Z. Hart

Open Source

The bulk of my open source work in recent years has been on .NET MAUI and Xamarin.Forms. But I've accumulated a few side projects over the years, too.

A few years back I found I needed a simple way to get upload files from a Windows CI server to Dropbox; this spawned a little command-line utility called PneumaticTube.

I'm a big fan of Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen. After years of keeping my next actions and projects in Outlook, I moved to the simpler Todo.txt format. I loved the idea of the todo.sh script for easily working with the Todo.txt format from the command line, but I'm mostly a Windows guy. Rather than install Cygwin, I created a version of the command line interface in Powershell; I still use this daily. I also created a version for Windows Phone (RIP) that I maintained until that platform died. Both projects parse the text files using a .NET library I created.

I've worked on a couple of projects which use HipChat for collaboration, and I wanted a helpful chatbot to handle some tasks. So I contributed to XmppBot-for-HipChat and wrote several plugins to extend it.

I also created a library to make converting between units of measurement easier, especially when dealing with different systems and inconsistent names and abbreviations.

You can find my contributions to other open source projects at GitHub.

Other Projects

In 2017, I co-wrote a guided meditation app called FocusMinder with my wife and launched it in the iOS, Android, and Windows app stores.

In 2013, as Google Reader (RIP) was ending, I wrote my own reader clone. It was hosted on Azure. The front-end was a single-page web application (using ASP.NET MVC, Razor, and Knockout.js); the backend utilized Azure Service Bus to handle the work of retrieving and parsing RSS updates. Tons of fun to write, but ultimately there was just too much competition in the space for it to remain viable. One of these days I'll remember to post the source code for posterity.

Writing and Speaking

It's been a while, but I used to write about programming stuff on the CodeWise blog.

I wrote about embedding Xamarin.Forms in native apps for the Xamarin blog.

In 2011 I gave a talk at the BSUG - Reactive Extensions and Remote Automation with Windows Phone 7. Materials from the talk can be found here.