Skip to main content

People Rock

Really awesome to work with my FB app teammates. They are really great great great people! Fast learner, elite programmer, dedicated executor , warm-hearted contributor. The app is around the corner, we are going to publish it in a few days. Though there're still many problems remaining to be solved, I really feel some sense of achievement. My teammates really rock. Even with no web programming base at the beginning, we picked them one by one at a very short time. Even though I am the slowest learner in the team, I also have self studied HTML&CSS(Wrox HTML5 24 hour  trainer), PHP(O' Reilly Head First PHP&MySQL), Facebook Graph API(plus many previous FB Apis), a little bit of JavaScript,MySQL,J_Query, J_Son from W3schools,Google and many online resources. Our app consists of four pages, two of them are very important pages. I help develop one of the important pages. It should not be hard, but really takes me quite a lot of time for me to make something. It takes some time to understand how data are transmitted among the client side and the server side. There are a lot of things to concern about. For instance,it is generally good to use PHP for data transmission from the server, but since PHP can only run in a server, keeping on posting&getting from the server and the client will make too many function calls and consume too much time. It would be good to use JavaScript to help fetching the data from cookies to make less function calls with the server, but that is less secure.  We've got to make trade offs. It might be intuitive to use HTML form to post data to PHP, but it may not be a good idea if the data needs to be handled several times and the UI designer needs to make some J_Query animation functions with blocks of these data. Ajax is also a quite big challenge. I am not very sure about these terms, but I really learned a lot along the way. My teammates are really clever. The database is developed within one day by Mingzhe and Yingbo has written a lot of PHP functions but rewrote them using JavaScript. Xiangyun has made a great contribution to the team and he is really an elite in any aspects, no matter it is UI , web programming or hardware programming. It's great to work with these great people, I really appreciate and honor them. Comparing with them, I am much normal and ordinary. Though we all didn't have a strong web programming experience, they really learned much faster than me. Though I have edited some great features in my page,like autocomplete, datetime picker using J_Query, the codes are mostly modified from various sources. I didn't code as that much. So far, I am still not very familiar with JavaScript and many other languages, Try to catch up lah, haha~~ I have encountered many challenges as well. For instance, I want to get the friend list of one of my friends however facebook didn't allow me to access these data. As I know from the developer site, FB only allows access token for users to access his/her friends information, but doesn't allow apps to do so. The Graph API does not support useful functionality appeared in some old facebook apis as well. I seem that can only know the mutual friends between two ids using a previous api method if I do not have either of the two people's authorization. Don't know why, but facebook is deprecating most of its old apis...

Next week, more on UI and creative stuffs. May invite some UI designers to help make some pictures and get some feedbacks from the users once it starts officially testing and operating. Good Night.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

InnovFest 2015

I attended the innovFest 2015 event. It was quite eye opening. Besides the booth, some topics in the forums also interested me. The first topic I joined was the Kopi Chat with Yossi Vardi, a famous Israeli entrepreneur and investor. He is straightforward and humorous. When talking about the most important reason why people wake up with a great idea but ended up sleeping without executing anything, he collected answers from the audiences. One answer pretty much fitted his appetite-- "People fear about losing faces". He shared his opinion with the quotes from Theodore Roosevelt, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually st...

Time Goes By, So Fast

It's been a week since the last blog entry, time goes by so fast. This week's highlights: 1. Rethought about career development. http://www.douban.com/note/276145923/ 2. Treated my friends a traditional Shaoxing meal. 3. Started to learn Ruby on Rails. http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html 4. Started to read the book "Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design" by Giles Colborne. 5. Recorded some vocals. http://site.douban.com/shaohuan 6. Watched this Ted speech:  http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit.html 7. Followed Ahbei(founder of Douban) on Zhihu(Chinese version of Quora). 8. " 我认为世界上不存在一流的人才,世界上只有存在一流的人才一定是学习能力,谦虚,把自己当平凡的人" --马云(Jack Ma)

About Memory

Today, I went for an Evernote Sharing event in an incubator named Blk71. The event is more on user feedbacks and marketing. There are three thoughts to be highlighted. 1. Attending this kind of entrepreneur events is a very good approach for reaching out more contacts. Many people who have their own businesses or plan to build their own startups will come and attend this kind of events.There is one entrepreneur who shared his experience of how he used Evernote to design his own app. He got the chance to advertise his own app while sharing the experience. Another software developer shared how his company integrated Evernote's public API. He indeed shared a lot more on his own product rather than Evernote. During the break, I talked with two entrepreneurs. One is a NUS computer engineering alumni. He is now running his own retailing company on baby products. It works well as there weren't competitors in Singapore when he first started his business. Though there is no relations...