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Have Fun

One major difference between Geeks and Nerds is that geeks enjoy breaking/creating things while nerds enjoy understand existing things in a deeper level. Nothing good or bad about that. It's just personality. I guess I'm more nerdy than geeky in that sense.

This week, I joined the 2 day Hackathon organised by Labgoo,Singapore. The company consists of two young passionate people-- Sha and Raymond. Its main branch is an interesting Israeli startup known for its voice control game-Pah!  I knew this company half a year ago when Sharon, my friendly NOC coordinator found it quite a good match for me to go Labgoo for internship through the NOC Israel programme. It's a pity that I didn't make it in the end. However, it is great to have the chance to know the company better in the Hackathon.

Honestly, I love the company. Yosi is passionate and inspiring.  Sha jie is fascinating. Raymond works hard. They make interesting things. Recently, they are selling a tablet teaching app and just finished developing a voip iOS app. In this Hackathon, Sha jie and the girl power team (Xialin, Yin Yue, Eugene,one another) developed a whole product in a night, which is really amazing. This app gamifies the medicine taking process and provides data analysis for doctors to better monitor the patients. They executed the idea so well that the whole thing is actually working for real. Yosi also showed great interests in this app, especially for the data analysis part developed by Sha jie. I will have to say Sha jie is really amazing and unbelievable! Technical wise, Sha jie used the CodeIgniter which is a open sourced MVC framework for PHP. I happened to develop my app in CodeIgniter during this Hackathon, too. It is really good to use. I am also astonished by myself to master the framework so quickly. I'm also amazed by my teammate, Yangfan, who's an EE student and mastered HTML and CSS  quickly in a night. We two delivered a clean supermarket website and a rough iOS app to help housewives to better save time and money before going to the supermarkets. Though it is not completed yet, learning itself is so much more important than anything else.

There are quite a lot of interesting ideas showing around in the Hackathon, one of which is a music app developed by two of my CS3217 friends. The UX is interesting, probably inspired by a Chinese music discovery app, named Jing.fm. Another one is a social alarm clock which takes in other people's voices and customise the ring tones. Well, this idea is not new, there is another app in China which does the exact same thing. In the final CS3217 project, my team is also going to make a social alarm clock but the approach is totally different. The user will have to pass our game(up&down morning exercises/physical engine games,etc)before set the alarm off. Otherwise, we'll post a status on facebook. The other teams are OK interesting lah. Some use Unity game engine, some use PhoneGap, another startup using iOS gesture recogniser to migrate their facebook app to iOS platform.

One pity of this activity is that I didn't take the good chance to socialize with the people around.  It is actually a very good chance to get to know more people. I was again too shy to talk to Yosi and the others. After the Hackathon, I went for the CS3217 meeting and missed a second chance to mingle around with people. On Wednesday, I also missed the chance to meet them in N-house due to another project meeting. Well, technically, I am getting better, but still not good enough compared to VERY good ones like Wang Sha. However, I have the passion and determination to be a good software engineer in 10000 hours' time. One plan comes to my mind--  Maybe I shall work in Labgoo as an intern after graduation and train the skills more before meeting the standard of a VERY good programmer.

Some other good things of last week:
I worked out a small iOS app for my FYP and the Prof seems to be quite happy about that.
I submitted a summer internship application in Spotify, NY. Though I may not get approved as a fresh graduate, I shall at least take a try for my most interested company.

Bad things:
Didn't review the Image Rendering class. Dying on that module.

I recently find myself not confident enough and not satisfied with the work I have delivered. Maybe a shall give myself a more positive feedback and move forward with less burden. Have fun!



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