ai generated image showing a road heading off into the distance towards 2026 which has a light shining through it. on the road there is a text marking saying start with an arrow pointing to the horizon. the sky is blue with clouds separating and confetti falling. 2026 is a new start for me and while I’m looking forward to the next twelve months, this optimism has come at a cost.

The cost has been the closure of my Limited Company that I setup in 2023 and marks my departure from the world of contracting and my return to regular employment.

Now I’m fortunate in that I’m returning to work for not only a previous client, but also a previous employer who reached out to me with this opportunity. I clearly tick all their boxes, and they know I can do the job they need me to do.

So although there will be challenges ahead, my new role will see me helping drive their product forward; I do need something outside of work to keep my mind working.

This blog was created many years ago with the theme being that I wouldn’t fixate on a single technology, that I would mix things up a bit. I think this has stood me in good stead for being a contractor as it kept my skills sharp and varied.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that I have a number of personal projects including the Smite Scoreboard app and Motorhome Stopover website with its companion mobile app.

While these projects are always quite needy in that they require regular updates, especially the mobile apps as the respective App Stores require apps to be built with the more recent versions of their SDKs. I fully understand the reasons for this, i.e. security updates and the like, but it is a regular pain in the backside to have to reimplement a feature because the API methods I was using have been deprecated.

But with at least one of these apps being functionally complete, I felt like I needed something new to get my teeth into. So I’ve decided to revisit a project that was initially just a proof of concept. A project that makes a statement in todays political climate in terms of privacy.

The project is called ShhhSMS and allows secure text messages to be sent over good old-fashioned SMS. No WhatsApp, no Signal, no Telegram … none of that.

The source code and (I think) a decent README file explaining the rationale of the project and it’s usage can be found on Github

But it doesn’t stop there, no, why make things easy on myself.

With the current source code written using the now obsolete Xamarin framework and only targeting Android devices, I’m thinking that I should see if I can rebuild this app using MAUI and (because I don’t need to target iOS) do it entirely on a system running Linux and using the JetBrains Rider IDE.

Now I know I am going to run into some obstacles along the way. Some of them will be small and others not so much but hopefully I won’t run into any showstoppers that stop my in my tracks.

I’ll be sure to report back in a series of posts but even if I’m taking on an unachieveable goal here …. I’m sure I’ll have some fun along the way (yep, I’m that kinda developer).

If you made it here then well done! I know that this post is a little scrappy, but I was keen to get it out of my head and blogged. Thanks for sticking with it :)