week 6: fighting for time

It really amazes me when I hear of students who manage their own startup companies while juggling school work. It really takes time management and sorting of priorities to reach that level.

Monday's lecture was yet another eye-opener for me. NUS enterprise gives a lot of monetary and advisory help to budding entrepreneurs! The startup scene in Singapore is really happening. My sister who graduated from SMU is also part of a young startup SageBy (go check it out!).

I also found the talk by Pieter Kemps from AWS very useful. I have a better understanding of cloud, and I really am grateful to be in this era where cloud has given so much benefits to everyone on the street. ^^

Pieter also talked about how to make a successful pitch. I believe that he is really the right person to give this talk because he has been exposed to so many pitches and would know what works and what doesn't.

I particularly found the 10, 20, 30 rule very sticky! I can remember it clearly. 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 font-size words. Perhaps minus the 30 font-size, this rule would be awesome for school! (: Providing plenty of visual aids help the audience to synchronise well with a guided idea, and still allow for some imagination. Not to mention that it is also aesthetically pleasing and attention grabbing.

This article Why Eyeballs No Longer Matter for Startups hammers in something that was raised during the presentation. It is that successful monetizing is crucial and having many visitors is not a strong enough reason for VCs to be impressed. - pause to visit the CORS website to check out biz modules offered in NUS -

So far, I'm really putting in my best for every module that I'm taking this semester. I have never felt so stressed, pressurized, busy, uncertain, unkempt and messy in my entire life. Perhaps I am now growing up.

No turning back

When cereal is plain, add coffee flavoured Meiji milk.
(Pei Yi, 2012)

-Pei Yi

Week 5: Pitching

This week's one was interesting. Many people came to present great ideas and some of them really have good intentions of benefiting society. Their success is defined by how much they can impact the world and make it a better place.

I really liked the preschool one because 1) I love kids, 2) Parents are so stressed and busy, 3) this app will benefit kids, parents and teachers! I can still remember my preschool days of colouring, using the computer, dancing and all that. It was always fun to tell my parents the adventures that I experienced at school everyday. I don't know my final project grouping, so I'm interested in this idea, but open to other ideas too.

I also noted that its becoming incredibly hard to come up with ideas that no one has thought of before. In a way, it makes me feel insecure that whatever "creative" ideas I have could be already be implemented by the person living down the road or across the globe. Yet, I recall from a previous lecture that went something like, "if no one has done a similar idea to yours, then its likely that there is some problem associated with that" Somehow, I feel a little confused. It's not ok that others have implemented it before and done a much better job, and its also not safe to work on a totally new idea?

Gnomerella: I made a simple short video to demonstrate gameplay, you can see it at this link:

I hope that others can appreciate the amount of effort that we put into this. Every piece of graphic is created from scratch by Gia, and the server response time is just _instant_. We have a really cute and awesome game idea, but due to time constraints, its not up to perfection.

Mobile cloud: I'm using trello for the first time! And we are developing a web app that I can see myself and friends using. I am still in a learning phase; reading up lots of articles and checking out some frameworks. Everything is organised into sprints, so we can work efficiently.

Keep calm and press on
~Pei Yi

Week 4: App seminar review of Group 7: Draw Something

I recorded down the presentations! (: After listening to the playbacks (with pausing and replaying), here is my review:

About the App - I think its cute to pick Draw Something as an App. I remember playing it with my friends and wishing that they would be more responsive with me. Because I am a shy person, I dared not invite acquaintances to play with me. In the end, I didn't have anyone to play with and gave up on draw something.

Implementation: I thought more details could be provided besides using Facebook JS and a server.

Good 

When Zynga took over Draw Something, I really liked how they incorporated phone notifications so that I know when my friend has finished her turn. Unfortunately, by that time, few people were still playing it actively.

The UI, I agree that its quite understandable. But I somehow cannot bring myself to say that it is outstanding. There are words of different sizes and some of low value add to user understanding.

Yes it is indeed quite funny to see how my friends draw. However, some friends like to give up and write out the words on screen instead. That's not good anymore.

Bad 

In order to gain revenue, they chose to make a bad decision to give a very _limited_ list of words to draw out. I agree that this is really a bad point!

Improvements & Commercial Potential

The idea of expanding to different languages is good too. I believe that the target audience can even be directed to young children as they explore their creativity and expand vocabulary. Maybe my command of Mandarin would be much better if there was a Chinese version of Draw Something for me.

Also, if I understand the presenter correctly, sponsors would pay advertising costs if the words include them or their products. Like for example, if Pepsi would like to advertise with Draw Something, they would pay for Draw Something to implement words like "Pepsi twist" for users to draw. This is excellent! However, if the product is not well known (eg. squishy shoes for mud), then it would be quite tough for users to guess. Just one of my musings. Companies must consider their marketing strategies for their own benefit.

Great job, group 7! (:

Week 3: Kinect & Windows Phone 8

Hey all!

The kinect talk was good! I did play with kinect once or twice before, and it was a good experience. (Especially playing dance central!) I was surprised to see how the kinect can detect the skeletal structure of the human body and follow the movements so clearly. If the lines were white and outlined black, it would have looked like a real creepy skeleton! I guess it would definitely be a very different experience to develop applications for the kinect. Perhaps I would read up more about it after this semester.

The windows phone 8 talk seems to be more like promoting it to us as a consumer, seeing the way he really emphasized on the inbuilt features. But I did catch that there is inter-app communication, which is a new idea. I do agree that its great to have apps to sync with each other, imagine all the possibilities!

I have to keep this post a short one, I have so much to do and so little time..

~Pei Yi

Week 3: every detail counts

Earlier in the week, I realised one lesson:  if I see any form of bug in my code, I need to take note and write it down to address it.

In the midst of rushing for time, I didn't check if the user authentication was working. Fortunately, the thought came into my mind to test it out and to my horror, I (again) rushed to fix it.

Also, while using Facebook's Javascript SDK, I referred to the documentation at the Facebook developer's app. When I started speed reading and doing CTRL F, I compromised on my understanding of how some APIs work. From that, I wasted still some precious time reading stack overflow and trying to figure if some forum threads are talking about the same problems as I'm facing. I could have saved the time if I read the official documentation more clearly ):

Working with my group: everyone in the group is really contributing so much, especially when we are a 3 member team. My group member encourages us very often, and this kept me grounded. I guess I have to admit that I'm still an emotional worker and not made of solid steel that can perform optimally in every situation. This module un-subtle-ly teaches stress management - working under pressure.

I won't die now, not yet.

Second assignment! Its great to meet my new group, and the ideas seemed to flow well as we were storyboarding our presentation. The app that we are doing a presentation on is Color. I think its interface is really good for a mobile app, not like those that crams everything unnecessary at once and has adverts as well. It was fun also playing with the app as we "visited" each other and requested each other for a broadcast. (:

~Pei Yi

Week 2: Learning to walk before a marathon

Our second lecture! Even though I know that the slides and all the materials have been uploaded onto the workbin, I am going to type my post without referring to them. I believe that there are a few takeaways from today's session that are worth remembering.

For the first segment, we were reminded of some key principles of software engineering. 

An inquisitive person came up to me when I was 10 years old and asked, "what are you doing?"

"Trying to earn CCA points by joining computer club!", I replied.

Derp(ina) - stupidity / ignorance

A curious person came up to me when I was 15 years old and asked, "what are you doing?"

"Competing with my friend to see who gets more downloads in our blogskin designs!", I answered.

A nosy person came up to me now as I'm 20 years old and asked, "what are you doing?"

"Heck the CAP. I'm learning how to create awesome web applications!"

Ah, the motivation counts. 

Another thing I wanted to write about is user experience. There are conventional ways of arranging page layouts according to the amount of information and type of information that needs to be communicated. And even for non-verbal / non-text information too. For example, my colleague in my previous internship pointed out to me that the "next", "ok" or submit button would be good if its placed in the center or right. 

I'm still thinking about the layout of the facebook assignment. But anyway, its really easy to change. We'll gather feedback after its up and running, we can make improvements then.

Scrum: My groupmate Gia loved the idea so much that he set up the tracking document even before Justin finished his presentation! I went in and wrote my task as "Facebook plugin". But Gia wanted me to break it down with more details. I'll work on that! (: Its a great feeling to try something new.

From Jonathon's presentation: He shared that when it gets closer to the deadline, people get really stressed and get more irritable. I can really identify to that and feel that its really important to consider others besides my own self.

Progress concerning my facebook assignment is getting started (esp for front end)! We simulated it on pen and paper and its quite a ball of fun! Keep in touch for more updates.

~Pei Yi

Week 1 workshop

Hi again!

The workshop on Saturday covered: setting up AWS, using Git, PHP, MySQL, Javascript and AJAX.

I really respect how much effort our seniors put in for our workshop. There were even seniors who weren't giving a presentation but there to just offer behind the scenes help.

Setting up AWS: It would have been a painful process without the help of Su Yuen guiding us through and with a installation guide on IVLE. For me, I just followed the steps through blindly, I guess it wouldn't be too important to know exactly about the various settings and options for now? At first I was quite grossed out by the looooong public dns, but since its provided free, maybe thats why hmm.

When the Git session got going, I was abit blur at first, wondering how he got his command line (I was typing  vigorously into my cmd prompt and nothing interesting was happening). Then I opened the Git GUI. Luckily I was clicking around randomly and "hey whats this?" - I found where to get the command shell. (Select repository -> Click tools -> Open a shell here) 

But my judgement is that its better to stick to the GUI. I feel that the important features can be easily accessed with the GUI and we don't have to memorise the commands this way. 

We had a good lunch break, I liked the food!

The workshop continued with Javascript, AJAX, PHP and MySQL. The important takeaway is that its not difficult to pick it up as a beginner given that I had some programming background in CEG and my past internship. But to truly build something awesome is another thing altogether. Resourcefulness + creativity + hardwork. I was not following too much since I read the slides the day before. Instead I was trying to use Eclipse after installing the PHP package. Since I had installed my own local server, I was trying to write PHP commands to access the database and fetch some data. I got stuck and decided to go back home and try to fix it.

So that night, after traveling 234923974829 miles home to (the land of ) tanah merah, I finally got apache working and my database can be accessed! (: (: (:

But I'm not 100% satisfied. The thing is that this database that I'm accessing right now is my own localhost which is the home server (which should be used for testing purposes). But how about the database that I created with AWS? How do I write the MySQL connection to access the online server? I will work on this after I publish this post. I welcome any inputs, please comment below! (:

~Pei Yi