A week without the Tech giants.

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

Impossible. That’s the first thing it comes to my mind by reading the title of this blog entry. But, is it really impossible? This week in class we learned it is not, but this will come with a lot of problems (unless you live in a small town with no access to the internet as I used to do before I moved to the city for college).

First: who are these giants? Just read the next post and you will know, probably you don’t even need to leave this page.

“How 5 Tech Giants Make Their Billions…” …

Now you know who the top 5 are, ask yourself if you think you can live at least a week without them (I mean you obviously can live but you know what I mean). Maybe if you’re an apple user like me you could say the easiest ones to leave behind would be Amazon, Microsoft and Google; I gave this answer when I was asked. Next I will talk about what I thought would be my easiest order to leave them.

  1. Amazon. I said this was the easiest one, but did you know almost all the incomes amazon have is because of their cloud services? AWS hosts a loooot of content we use on internet so if we just “turn off” Amazon a lot of web pages would do the same.
  2. Microsoft. This was my second choice because as an apple user I don’t use much of their products, only Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneDrive but I actually use sometimes the equivalents from Apple. The thing with Microsoft is that their services are more focused on companies, so it’s very probably that you be asked to used some product from Microsoft in your work, in mine we use Azure Web Services.
  3. Facebook. Facebook
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I’m not living in a smart city

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

Last week, we didn’t have a class because of our beautiful and not well followed constitution so we didn’t discuss any topic in class BUT I did went to work, school, meetings, parties, towns so I will talk about that, how the city I’m living is not that smart as a “Mexican silicon valley” should be.

The first thing is the lack of bridges or bridges in places that don’t have sense. I am talking about the bridges for pedestrians. I work in an office located in a very crowded avenue so it’s almost impossible to cross from one side to another unless you walk 500mts and try to cross in the crosswalk which activates the green line each 5minutes for 5 seconds so you may end up in the middle of the avenue. Why don’t you get off of your bus closer to your job you may ask, let me answer: I am lazy, obviously I’m taking the bus that leaves me the closest to my job which is in the other way of the avenue, well there’s another that may leave me at least in the same side as my job BUT if I want to take this bus I have to take another one to reach the place for that bus and I am not that smart taking buses.

Another thing that makes me believe my city ain’t smart is how they try to be smart but are too lazy to do it. The other day I went to Walmart and the made a big area for picking what you may buy online with a special zone, different colors, etc. But it wasn’t working, they had the place closed by yellow tapes like a crime scene. And the reason a get mad about this is because when

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Weekly review, week #4

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

Last week we focused on continue developing the requirements for our app. It is very important to have well defined our requirements, functional and non functional. Some points we have defined so far are

  • Development of an iOS app.
  • Native app developed using the Xcode tools.
  • Use of API’s for location services as google maps.
  • The design must be simple to the user with not many features but the ones that may cover the main functionality.
  • A Non-Relational database as MongoDB or FireBase.
  • The app must be available all the time.

Concerning the user interface we have opted for a simple as it can be design for the commodity of the user. We are still figuring out how the final design will look. We know what elements will our app have, but we still don’t know exactly how it will look.

We look like we are a little bit slow in the development, but this stage of the project is crucial for how the project will be developed later. We hope to have all well defined so no more changes be necessary later in the development.

How is it goin’, city

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

I missed the class for week three BUT I am good citizen, I think. Yeah, didn’t do a research about what my classmates studied in the class, but now I am available for everything they want to show me (don’t do an albur joke, please).

What I know we did (because I was there) was to getting together and plan how are we gonna deal with the data we collect from the users of the mobile app, they need to know they will share the info with us and have to agree in doing it, otherwise we would just be a new baby facebook.

So, we went to a meeting with our professor and discussed about that and… we didn’t reach a solution, but we were close. Actually while a was on my way to the meeting in the bus a realized we could do something like I was doing in that moment. Let me explain myself better, I am not a user of busses, I am new at this because of my new job, so I downloaded an app called Moovit which tells you how the public transport works in the city, THANK YOU.

Well, this app asks you if you want to a part of a world movement helping all the community to save the world by sharing your data and giving comments or feedback once in a while. I AM CLEARLY EXAGGERATING but it’s kinda true. They have like a forum where the users share their info and report of a problem with the app or the system or their lives. Anyway, I think that the simple fact of being part of a community that helps the others and the app recognize you for that is something good for you in exchange for giving the info, is Continue reading "How is it goin’, city" →

The smart citizens we are

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

The title for this entry isn’t correct. I feel like I am not being a smart citizen, well more like a not smart student because I have been having trouble dealing with how I manage my time and tasks/homework/social life/relationship (HA! I don’t have one 😂😔). But here I am, doing my blog entry for the week 2 in our week 4 😀

Well, if I can recall well, in the second week we had our first meeting as a team for the final project. I knew all my team partners since ever (4 years) except for one: David. I liked the guy, he is nice and also is with me in another class, we noticed it after we made the team. I am also working with Gabo, my friend since first semester and one of the people I most trust in the world (for specific things, he is dumb in few aspect of his life) and Constanza, the girl I met in my 3rd semester and who never stops of amazing me, I love to work with her because of how she makes me push harder so she doesn’t go in front of me. I love this guys.

Talking about the class, we decided we would do a mobile app for showing the users where the public bicycles of the city are located and also we take some data from their trips using them. With their permissions obviously.

So, Gabo is the only person with experience in mobile development, we decided to be iOS because Constanza and I hated android studio when we were partners int the mobile development class and had to make an android app. David is not an ISC so he hasn’t experience at all, but he is fine trying new things and we know he will Continue reading "The smart citizens we are" →

Trying JUnit

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

Now, for the Software Quality and Testing class, we went into JUnit for unit testing in java. To try it out I followed a tutorial, more like a class, that was pretty nice, I’ll give you the link somewhere in the post so you can do it by yourself. The reason I am l¡hiding the link over there is to you to read some of my post. It will be short, I promise.

Okay, I begun with Eclipse, the IDE for developers, more like java developers. I have always liked to use this IDE since I was in my first semesters of college. Okay, Eclipse already have JUnit or you just install the plugin if not.

I tried JUnit before in my Architecture class, so this was more like a refresh of what JUnit is. Some useful concepts and tools are this:

  • JUnit promotes the idea of “first testing then coding”, which emphasizes on setting up the test data for a piece of code that can be tested first and then implemented. This approach is like “test a little, code a little, test a little, code a little.”
  • A Unit Test Case is a part of code, which ensures that another part of code (method) works as expected. To achieve the desired results quickly, a test framework is required. JUnit is a perfect unit test framework for Java programming language.
  • Fixtures is a fixed state of a set of objects used as a baseline for running tests.
  • A test suite bundles a few unit test cases and runs them together. In JUnit, both @RunWith and @Suite annotation are used to run the suite test.
  • Test runner is used for executing the test cases.
  • JUnit classes are important classes, used in writing and testing JUnits.

So, what I learned

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Second test

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

Okay, I have not wrote any blog entry since my first blog post explaining what this blog would be about. The topic is the same, Software quality and testing. Now it has been three or maybe four weeks since the course began and I have to say, I haven’t been so much into it. I mean, I like the course and the topic, but for personal reasons I haven’t giving my best trying to learn.

Don’t misunderstand me, I have not been doing research about the course, BUT I have been having work experience with related to this. True, I didn’t say that about me, I am currently working as a frontend developer and yes, you may think (I used to) that there is no testing or QA in fronted development, but oh my carrot, there is a lot of testing. Actually, when I’m about to finish a component for a web app or something we always joke saying “I finished the task, now I have to wait for Dara to say it is wrong” because it’s true, there’s always something the designer don’t like how it looks or how it feels and we know the importance of user experience, so we always have in mind those little corrections we know we will have to do. So yeah, there is a lot of QA in frontend development.

In rare cases the page is approved without corrections and then it’s like:

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Well, keeping with what the class has been for me, I have missed some of them, hope it doesn’t make me miss the semester 😬. Agh, hate that I get distracted by my thoughts so easily. Okay, in the class we have worked about our final project, I don’t know if I discussed it already but you can see what’s it

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WEEKLY PLAN #3

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

This week we will start with the technical planning of the application. We will generate the backlog according to what, we have investigated and agreed, at the moment, is fundamental for our development flow.

Since Gabriel is the one who has more experience working with native applications for iOS, he will define the tasks about project configuration and initialization. From then on we will write the tasks related to the configuration of firebase, what we need according to the design ui of the application as design of views and generation of assets, etc. To avoid inconvenience, we will define all tasks with detailed description and acceptance criteria.

At the end of the week, because of the Project Management class, an interview will be held with Bosch, to finish clarifying some doubts regarding the requirements of the original project,  but it may be relevant for us to define the way in which the data that we will analyze later will be treated and stored.

For this phase we will use a board in trello:  https://trello.com/b/ds7Luyy1/mibici-app