Stairway To Heaven

I attended the Facebook Hackathon last Saturday with Zenan and Qiyue. It was an awesome experience. People there are really geeky and some teams are technically very strong. Unlike other hackathons I attended which are somewhat business oriented, this hackathon consists of only developers. No business models need to get examined. I guess that's the reason why it was so geeky and fun. The problem we want to solve is to help couples living long distances to better communicate with each other. It is painful for them to stick with each other while they cannot meet face to face very often. There are basically two needs:1. to have a unique private messaging channel where only two of them are in each other's contact. 2.to have a pair diary space that keeps track of their memorable conversations from the instant messaging channel. Zenan is really awesome in UX design and implementation. Qiyue is also very good. We managed to build the pair diary app with Pods, JSMessageViewController ...

I didn't intend to fly back home for this Chinese New Year when there are quite a lot of stuffs remaining to be done for the ReadPeer project. However, I eventually ordered the return ticket(refundable for SM2/SM3 student to fly home after graduation)in the last minute after several days' consideration. Unfortunately, I missed the flight on Jan 29th after fixed a bug on the website. Then I changed the flight to Jan 30th and stayed in Zhixing's place for a night and fixed some more problems in the previous iOS project. Gratefully, I returned home safely in the last hour of the CNY eve. It is quite uncomfortable to do nothing at home while I am used to work many hours a day. The first few days are more about visiting relatives and have lunch/dinner. During these days, it was more about observing. Quite a number of changes happen this year in China which affect the normal citizens. 1. Civil servants used to be one of the most desirable jobs in China. However, this year'...

The past week involves mostly on experimenting, somewhat similar to the experimental learning concept mentioned in the Lean Startups. The readpeer project finally went on test by real users and we gathered feedbacks to polish the system based on real situations. Xiaoli and Prof went for meeting in Hangzhou early last week and I'm the only one who dealt with bug fixing+ web service api development+operation. Early in the week, one senior(CTO) from Visenze(one of few real technical startups) in SG emailed me to join his company. Actually I was supposed to join his company after graduation instead of the Prof's company for a better exposure/involvement to a tech startup. However, I confirmed to Prof to make readpeer a product-standard one before moving to other projects. Now my role is almost fulfilled but I start to realize that it's not just about production design and development, but more about operation and continuous grows.  Even the functionalities and design works ha...

I stayed in my friend Zhixing's place after polishing the last CS3217 project together with Jingping last night. We plan to publish the small app on App Store to gain some experiences as individual mobile game developers. Hopefully we'll launch a neat version for girls around the Chinese New Year. The past week is pretty joyful, mostly on debugging and feature/UI polishing. I helped solve a crucial bug on Android TextView text selection. I also polished the website reading page JavaScripts to improve the user experience. The basic web service api also started to get developed. Last Saturday, I attended a design thinking workshop by the OrangeHive. Yangyu and I made a creative logo in the workshop and  that was an interesting experience.  The iOS app for readpeer is getting great. Most iOS development is done by the junior, Zijian while I sometimes help solve some bugs when he encounters problems. Zijian is getting self-motivated and happy playing with iOS development. That i...

I started to feel more enthusiastic when the team began to have new people. We started to build Apps and I've got the chance to learn new things again! A year 2 junior, Zijian decided to learn iOS and joined the team for internship. He is smart and quick in learning the materials. I suggested him to take CS3217 concurrently with the internship and thankfully he got the course admission. Another year 3 junior, Weiran also joined the team for internship on Android development. However, he is a bit weak in programming. Fortunately, I helped motivate him by introduce an online Android lesson on Treehouse. He now became interested in Android development. I've got some design books for him as well since he is interested in design and we've got to push him to be a tech designer. Last two weeks, I've built two simple beginner level android app running on my nexus 7. I also helped Zijian solved an important bug in his pageviewcontroller in IOS. That was a pretty good progress...

Last week, I attended a meetup about design thinking in Blk71. It was interesting. We were instructed to come up with a wallet for ourselves. The first step was to brainstorm and draft a wallet for oneself on paper. I drew a credit card with a universal sim card chip on it. The card can be kept at the back of a phone. The rest payments will be handled in the phone apps. That was a pretty futuristic wallet. The next step was to get interviewed by a neighbour who just drew his/her ideal wallet. I was interviewed by a Korean manager from JFDI.asia. The neighbor was supposed to make the wallet for me. He first let me share my ideas and concerns. Then he asked me to take out my current wallet and categorize the necessary items. It turned out that there are quite a lot of necessary items in my wallet and they definitely cannot fit into one single card. Some items like coins and keys also need extra spaces to squeeze into a wallet. The next step was to interview the other nei...

Last two blog posts have been deleted because they are company related and the Prof is not comfortable to reveal them to the public. I also feel unhappy because my last month's blog count becomes zero. To me, idea worths nothing, but team is the key. Many entrepreneurs think in that way. But it may not be the same case in the academic/business world. Unfortunately, I've got no life besides the project, thus I can only write about that in my blog. Just to bear in mind not to reveal the key documentaries of the company. It's been painful weeks when we are in a state of transform. The lack of a clear project plan and consolidated vision brought many unnecessary mistakes. Now we started to talk to real customers and test ideas in real use case scenarios. However, the fact that we focus too much on the complexity of the features instead of light-weighted MVPs makes it too heavy to lose. A cooler approach would be to come up with multiple mini projects for market testing and th...