Review week #9

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

After finishing what we had pending about the mockups and the presentation of our advances, we continue with the planning of  what we are going to use for our app and  also how we could do it. So, some ideas that the team had were:  continuing with the idea of developing our applications for an iOS enviroment, were we are implementing it in native. And also with that we are working in the integration of Google maps and with it the geolocalization.

We had a good start of the week by plannung these, but unfortunately we could´t go to the reunion with ken for feedback.

Review week 9

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

This week we were making the google maps integration.

We faced some troubles because some unknown errors, but with help of the google maps api documentation, god google and his disciples stack overflow and other reliable sources (ok, other blogs that seemed cool) we were able to solve them, also Gabriel knowledge was helpful.

Smart Surveillance

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

This week we watched some videos about different projects that are expected to be implemented in some of the top cities around the world. This projects are intended to make these cities smart cities by adding some technology into their neighborhoods that helps with the correlation between citizens and the city itself.

Although this projects are being developed with the best intentions (I want to believe), some tough decisions need to be made. Most of them are focused on the use of the data generated by the population so, yes, the problems are related to PRIVACY (so scary).

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I personally believe that this kind of projects are in benefit of the greater common and I definitely would agree to the government investing on their development. Yeah, I do care about privacy and all that stuff but as a good citizen I need to know that the only fact of being on the internet means you have abandoned your privacy rights in many senses for useless purposes that only benefits one or two (or five👀) big companies. So, I would like to people to be educated enough to know when and how they should share their info, when to trust when to not.

In these projects in particular that may help in many different ways the cities we all live in together, we should be more open mind and work with the community as a team and make them bigger and better.

Plan week 9

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

This week we will start with the integration of google maps. Remembering the project mockups, we need to be able to display the map, get our current location and also show our position reflected there. Maybe (pending) we will show also information about nearer places.

So we will start trying to develop the map screen and at least be able to make other needed google maps api’s requests although we still do not show/draw the answer.

Review week 8

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

This week we worked with the firebase and google maps installation. Also we were able to create the needed accounts and generate the api keys.

Since we (Mark, Constanza, David) are new developing iOS native applications we have some challenges with firebase set up, but regardless of this was nice of us because we learnt about this process.

 

The secret life of bugs

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

Although the title sounds interesting, the original reading from which I am writing this post (The Secret Life of Bugs) was really boring, interesting, but also boring. I mean I get it because it involves a lot of research, but I don’t think there was fully necessary to include all the information in just now document.

I like it includes data collected from surveys and (I wasn’t surprised) it’s hard to see or bad that most people is still doing manual testing instead of automated and as usual the major kind of bugs found were Code Bugs and the least are spec bugs, which is pretty reasonable because if specs aren’t well defined from the beginning, then, well, the project just won’t work.

That’s all what my mind can give for this entry, sorry but my head is just tired. Peace!

Social Cohesion

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

In my last weekly post I talked about the top cities in the world and why are they the top cities in the world. One of the categories that called my attention was the social cohesion so I went into it to know what this is about and why Helsinki is the top city in this category. Btw, I didn’t know where Helsinki was and it turns out it is the capital of Finland (pretends to be shocked).

So, wikiprogress define social cohesion as a cohesive society that.

  • Works toward the well being of all its members
  • Fights exclusion and marginalisation
  • Creates a sense of belonging
  • Promotes trust
  • Offers its members the opportunity of upward mobility (rising from a lower to a higher social class or status)

A cohesive society is characterized by resilient social relationships, a positive emotional connectedness between its members and the community and a pronounced focus on the common good.

According to the same study I mentioned in my previous post (The top 50 smart cities in the world), Helsinki improved its overall ranking by seven places from last year and nine places from 2015, which was used as the reference year for the index. “Helsinki is a fine city. And it wants to be even finer in the future. This index is another expression of how Helsinki has managed to take leaps forward in a short period of time”, says Mayor Jan Vapaavuori.

It shouldn’t be strange to see a Finland’s city in this top due to all we know about Finland. And what we now? well, at contrary of what we are used to, I have never heard or read bad news from this nordic country. Actually I don’t know much about it, but what I’ve always known is that the citizens in there Continue reading "Social Cohesion"

Mexico City in top smart cities

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

This week I decided to do some research of which are the top smart cities in the world and in a website I found the name of Mexico City (WOW). Yeah, of course it wasn’t because it was part of the top but because NY was on it and only bigger city in the continent is Mexico City. Sorry to disappoint you, guys.

But, seriously, would you think that site is a reliable source after reading that? All Mexican who has been in Mexico City knows it is impossible this city belongs to the top 5 of smart cities in the world. I recently visited the biggest Metropoli in our country last December, I was a tourist in a big, big city. I must say that after my visit now I see why the chilangos catalog Guadalajara as provincia. The comparison in sizes is huge.

But why Mexico City can’t be part of this top? Well, according to a research made by the IESE Business School, there are many factors to evaluate and say if a city would be considered in the top cities and the top cities in each factor are the following:

  • Human capital: London.
  • Social Cohesion: Helsinki.
  • Economy: New York.
  • Governance: Bern.
  • Environment: Reykjavik.
  • Mobility: Paris.
  • Urban planning: New York.
  • International Outreach: Paris.
  • Technology: Hong Kong.

As you can see Mexico it is not in the top of any of the factors, nor a Latin American city, which can be related to the biggest problem Latin America is facing: bad governance or corruption. I mean, if the study would’ve been made by a association in Mexico, we may be the top of some category (I’m joking).

So, it is sad not seeing your country as top tier in such important things, but at the same time Continue reading "Mexico City in top smart cities"

Intro to DevOps

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

This is a post about me giving you an introduction to DevOps, but for this I had to learn myself what DevOps mean. First I would like to say what I think of DevOps before I read anything, only pure experience and casual discussions about this with colleagues and friends.

DevOps sounds like development operations, which is operaciones de desarrollo in Spanish (it’s easier for me if I translate first). With this in mind, I would say that a devOps developer would be in charge of creating a flow system for all the tools and stuff the system could need, this is from servers to deployment but nothing to do in the code of the project in particular. I mean, he or she will establish the environment for the -for example- a web developer may be able to work and deploy all changes he or she make. Something like that.

Okay, now the definition I found on the post my professor recommended us (What is DevOps?) says a lot, a lot of DevOps and finding a single definition is so hard that I just kept the one the author gives first:

DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.

So I am right in one thing, DevOps involves all the process, actually is kinda a process by what I understood, also it talks more about the environment where the project will be developed and not the system itself. Also, there were given other points I think are useful to “fully” understand what this methodology is.

  • Infrastructure Automation – create your systems, OS configs, and app deployments as code.
  • Continuous Delivery – build, test, deploy your apps in a fast and automated manner.
  • Site Continue reading "Intro to DevOps"

Review week 7

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

This week we were able to finish all the needed mockups regarding to the functional requirements. Since we had the mid-semester presentation we prepared the requested slides with the work we had already done, mockups and diagrams.

Finally we initialized the project to transfer all the work to a tangible, functional application.