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:

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

Weekly Plan #2

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

Last week we started getting the hang of Xcode. Making some playground files and coding in swift. We had some problems with the organization and couldn’t do the specifications for the app.

That’s why for this week we will be making the specfiications so later on we can base our progress on those specifications.

Start making specifications for app

Personal experience in Smart Cities

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

Hello, there. This is my introduction to a new category, also for my Smart Cities class, but in this one I will be talking in singular, just about me and how I feel on it, my experience with the class, pues. (It’s from norteños ending and explanation with “pues”).

Anyways, this course begun 2 classes ago and what can I say about it. First I have to say that in all my career I have never been in a class with the majority of my friends, it is awesome to share the class with them and furthermore be 1 team (that later become 2 bc it was to big ). Second: the professor, well, it’s Ken, everyone loves Ken, he was the first professor I toke a software related class with (fundamentals of programming).

In the first class he asked what we believe the course was about, and not it is not about smart cities, it is about how to build a smart city. That’s all. The second class was about planning our project which is in our team blog post The beginning and Weekly Plan #1 Smart Cities. Go and check them out. Peace.

Software de Calidad

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

This is my introduction to a new category that I’ll include in my posts. It will be related to Software Quality and Testing and the reason I will begin with this is that I am taking this class in my new and last semester of college.

Now that I think of, it is bad/wrong/mysterious/weird/funny that I am taking this class in my last semester when it is supposed to be taken in the 6th (2 years ago (yeah, it is my 10th semester)). The reason of why I think this is bc I believe software testing as really important phase in you project development usually left for the last.

I believe is important to be testing your code from the first line you write (ok, no that much) to the last one, but right now I will no give more arguments because, again, I’m taking this so important class in my last semester and I need to learn more.

Anyways, I have been much time without writing, I have to make myself used to it. Hope my post be good enough for you.

Weekly Plan #1 Smart Cities

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

This week the plan is to download the necessary tools and start investigating on things we will need in the development process later on.

The overall tasks will be:

Download Xcode and start developing simple tests to familiarize with platform
Start making specifications for app
Start a mockup of what will be the final app

Cryptography pt. 2: STATS

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

I will now begin with a series of three last posts. Each one will have as a topic one of the topics of the course we haven seen, but with a different approach. I will talk about the topic but tried to be applied in our project, and by which means could be.

Starting with cryptography. We will need to use cryptography in our project, and I talked about it in that post, because we are managing many important information. Usernames and passwords are going to be stored in the database, as well as the results that will get from using the game. All these things are better not be seen from the outside, so they must be difficult to read and impossible to understand.

One of the alternatives we thought at the beginning was to use the methods that the tool we used could have. When we started using php (thing we don’t do now) we were planning to implement one of the functions that could make a big hash of the text that we were planning to store. It could work because it used md5 algorithm, but one of the problems we could have was that the key to decrypt the text had to be saved in the php script, which could make it vulnerable at the end.

We’ve also seen that the MySQL system we are using also implements some methods in the insert commands. MySQL has some interesting methods that work with AES scheme (Advanced Encryption Standard). This can also sound good, but still we have the same key problem. That’s why we thought of getting doing a cutomized key for each user. Constructing a key using some characters from its name and last name resulted in a different key for each person, thus making it Continue reading "Cryptography pt. 2: STATS" →

The beginning

--Originally published at How to HACK or not

The project is oriented to be an extension of a bike rebalancing predictive system for the Guadalajara Bike Sharing System (BSS) called “MIBICI”, which will use the public data available through the local government BSS webpage.

We will develop a bike user application where the user will be able to show himself as “connected” and enter the key of the bicycle he is using. Each time the user travels n meters away, he will send his location, latitude and longitude, in such a way that we will be able to know in real time where a determined bicycle is, and at the end of the travel we will also have the complete route that the user followed.

The recollection of this date will be useful to know which are the busiest routes, which can be very useful to make decisions regarding infrastructure improvements as creation of bicycle lanes, more bicycle collection or battery charging points, etc; or even lucrative purposes such as what is the best position for a point of sale of energy drinks, sportswear, and more others.