Stairway To Heaven

I started to read more entrepreneur related books. Two weeks ago, I finished reading a book named "Hackers and Painters" written by Paul Graham. Now I'm reading another very interesting book named "The Lean Startup". I finished half of the book and found the concepts helpful in building a small&beautiful tech startup. However, practise is somewhat more important. Shamefully, the readpeer project didn't really follow the lean startup approach, but more of a traditional way. We didn't plan for the MVP(minimum variable product) the users' need. Instead, we focused too much on completing features we thought the users might love. We really need to test on the ideas before driving too deep to the development. We've tried to use Scrum for project meeting. However, the fact that most other teammates are part-time undergraduate students made it very difficult to build a real startup. The productivity is also quite low. In the past one month, the PHD a...

"Let me think that there is one among those stars that guides my life through the dark unknown."--Tagore It is undoubtably the most fruitful summer of my student life, especially the two months' experience in Beijing.  I planned to go for the entrepreneurial path instead of the normal office life. Gratefully, I received more blesses than what I should get. I'm not a devout Christian, but there do seem to be sort of supernatural power which directs the steps. My final year project received an initial funding of 50k SGD which draws me to explore the project further. However, I know that my future career (at least the market) would be in China, thus I went for the entrepreneurial trip in Beijing with my own savings and determinations. Thankfully, I got accepted by Google Summer of Code again and can use the funding to cover the expenses in Beijing. More importantly, I've got to meet a lot of young entrepreneurs in meetups, coffee shops, incubators, hackathons, ...

Last week's blog was written on Douban when Blogger editor wasn't working behind the Great Fire Zone. It's a brief summary on my four weeks' trip in Beijing. There are also some thoughts about managing a NGO. This is the last week for the GSOC project . Thankfully, I managed to write a 20 pages documentation for the work I've done in these three months. Though it doesn't sound like a complicated project, there are quite a number of technologies being explored. Honestly, a right direction/instruction is somewhat more important than the actual coding. I'm grateful that my mentor Ashish gave me good suggestions on the importance of each sub project at the very beginning. This helped save a lot of time. In this patient timeline project , we examined novel ways to create an environment to display a patient's medical records and medical history. There are three sub problems to address. How to import the patient’s medical records How to process t...

It's my first month working with real projects(my real, I mean something that's going to be used by the public). It's so different from school projects. Every detail matters, from the backend logic to the page buttons. These two weeks, I worked closely with two talented designers, one from a well-established startup company named Umeng Analytics and another doing his own startup after quitting a mobile gaming company named HappyLatte. I know the first designer,PJ, in a hackathon. He is really talented, should be the best designer I've ever worked with so far. I persuaded Prof.Tung to send me to Beijing to work with him on the first prototype and it turns out to be a right decision. He is not only good at design, but also good at UX. He reads a lot. He already came up with a wireframe of the project. Next week, he's going to finish designing the first round of UI design(around 15 pages). The market price for a very good designer is around 5k RMB(1k SGD)/page, however...

 1. Polymorphic Association http://railscasts.com/episodes/154-polymorphic-association http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#polymorphic-associations For instance, a book can be liked and a video can also be liked. To make a generalised association which can like both a book an a video, we can simply make a polymorphic association named likeable which contains the likable_type and likable_id.  2.  Choose between has_many :through and has_and_belongs_to_many http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#choosing-between-has-many-through-and-has-and-belongs-to-many For instance, a book has many tags and a tag can be associated with many books. To make a simple many-to-many relationship, we can simply use has_and_belongs_to_many. However, to create an indirect association through a joint model, we can use has_many:through. 3. execJs: 'Could not find a JavaScript runtime' error. To add gem 'execjs' gem 'therubyracer...

Just recovered from last weekend's hackathon in Blk71. It was a nice one, except that our team didn't get the top prize. Honestly, we are among the most hardworking teams and we delivered a cool app. That's great. Though it is the process that matters the most, the team still feel quite down when the result doesn't fit our expectation. The less hardworking teams actually made it, not because their apps are cooler, but that they used the apis provided by the sponsors. However, our app will probably be further polished to fit the real market whereas most other teams will not move on. That's a quite big difference. The idea first came when Jerry(the project manager) and I met in a hotpot restaurant in Beijing two months ago. It's a travel app which records the friends' location when they post images and generates travel history summery.  Two of my juniors, Zeyu and Cui wei are very interested to join, thus we form a team to make the app out. Jerry himself ...

"When you commit for something, it becomes some sorts of responsibilities." I came back to SG to attend the commencements few days ago. Actually, I didn't intend to come back so soon. Firstly, I still haven't finished the voluntary job in One-Man university(wanmen). Indeed, I enjoy it so much that I spend days and nights coding the system. Secondly, my favourite profs are not attending the commencements(Indeed, I think my favourite prof would rather me to work harder on the great projects than taking a photo with him). Thirdly, the commencement of CEG(computer engineering)takes place in different dates with SOC and Engin while my most projects are actually accomplished with SOC peers. However, I finally bought the air ticket, firstly because I have committed to Sharon(the NOC Israel coordinator) that I'd better come back to attend the commencement day since it is one of the most important days in one's life. Secondly, our iOS team has committed to attend the...