Stairway To Heaven

I was very excited to write sth last night after Monday's class. However, I was stuck with a bug in the previous assignment and thus lost the passion to write this blog. Here I am today, to write some thoughts down before my passions gone. About Project Management. 1. Idea First or Team first? I agree with Yingbo that it really depends on the projects. If the timeline is as limited as CS3216, team definitely goes first. It's very dynamic to polish the ideas and make them work later. But for very large projects, ideas should not be easily changed, then teams would have to go next. I experienced the team first approach in the first two projects. It works perfectly fine. In that approach, everyone actively contributes and there are no hierarchies or non-negotiable conflicts in the team. Though there may be unequal workload distributing problem due to merits of different people in the team, people will be dynamically switch their roles when they finish t...

Fig1.Home page(create new help) I think the team's goal of making it super easy for users to post helps is really good. However, this page involves too many checkboxes and privacy issues that on the contrary increase the complexity of posting a help. For instance, how can you calculate the reliable people? The criteria we assumed in our algorithm may not match the user's mind. Neither can we assume that all the friends have SMS and other information included in their profiles.   It's also very sensitive to post to all friends' walls. In our first assignment, we tried that and the whole news feed will be filled with the same content. That's very annoying. The checkboxes also have some overlaps. Say if one selected "all my friends"+"reliable friends", same people will be informed twice or even more times. That's even more annoying. Furthermore, the additional "needs quick help" option makes it even more complicated. The text input of...

Long time no blogs. Record some random stuffs here. 1.Monday, entrepreneurer's share. VSee-- a successful online conference provider. CEO:Milton--a computer scientist graduated from Stanford and UC Berkley. Ideas: It's hard to promote your product, even it's a good one. I know from Milton that many great people have tried to do video conferencing but failed. The technology is really challenging but Vsee survived. I admires Milton a lot, for his perseverance. It's really hard to imagine that  one can hold this belief for so long(five years) when there is no sign of getting profits. I know it's not about making profits(at least for Milton), it's really about creating values and making a difference. But how can one survive in this REAL world without worrying about his/her essentials? By essentials, I mean the basic needs for food, living, etc. without relying on other people's help. Well, maybe those who are just too rich to worry about those stuffs or t...

Today we had our pitching session in LT19. Prof. Ben invited many speakers from the industry to share with us their ideas. Some of the ideas are really interesting and worth recording. Personally, I like the idea of Cliquefund, a new investment idea that focus on impacts rather than profits. It sounds like a non-profit charity funding, also like an angle with no technology support. I think the idea would be beneficial for the people or companies who receive the fund, most likely startup companies, but may not be fair for the investors. This idea will definitely make a good social impact, but I'm really doubt whether this idea will actually become reality as the monetary really depends on the investors, whether they are money-oriented or not. This idea reminds me of a facebook app named Causes, which makes small portion of money out of the funding people raised for a social problem. There are nice people around. Hopefully some investors are that nice, too. How Cliquefund makes the...

Well, it is indeed a tragic fact that there are many more followers than leaders in the world. I realize this when we launched our first Facebook app last night. Initially, we thought that most people would love to try something new, but the fact is that more people intend to watch others first, then decide whether they want to join. When we first added the news feeds, we fully considered about people's privacy concern. i,e., we only post news feeds on the initial gossip creator's wall and never show the feeds on other related persons' walls. That's a way to eliminate duplication of the same message displaying on one's news feeds. However, the initial gossip creator may not be a big node in the social network. It's the people being gossiped that really make the difference! Why these people get gossiped? Because they attract followers' eyeballs, they are different from these followers! Unless these people love to gossip, otherwise, our app wo...

Monday's presentation was full of interesting sparks. Of all the eleven teams, only one chose to present FB app, which is Sims Social. The others all chose to present ipad apps. That's not so surprising as Ipad(Tablets) is the most recent platform and there are a lot of blank spaces for us to fill in. The ten ipad apps shared in the seminar covers various fields like e-payment, news-media, education. What surprised me most is that many of us find education a very promising area for mobile app development...As ipads are being utilized as an educational tools in various educational levels, education is really going to be a great pie. Wait, I need to finish comments for my assigned app first. Pulse News, a news media app with good social features. News media are getting more social and mobile and probably "cloudy" in the recently years. Organizing news media contents can be a promising area since there are always interesting things happening around and people just have...

When it came to the end of today's lecture, many classmates started to choose their teammates for the mobile-cloud project. I felt a bit lost when I realized that I still didn't form my new group yet. The IOS guys should be very popular and they should have already been booked ahead. As the programmers normally tend to form groups with technical guys, there might not be enough programmers left in the end. It would be good to form a group as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I didn't take the good timing for grouping. I am still not over with the FB app yet. However, many groups have already formed. I do feel a sense of insecure. Who will I be working with? The cruel thing is the that stronger people will tend to choose to work with strong team members. What if there are not enough programmers in the team? That's almost impossible to get things done.The fortunate thing is that the people in the class are really astonishing. But I'm also not that confident on my progra...