5 July 2016
June was mostly spent on internship and Wikimania.
Early June, I was still working on the app written in Xamarin Forms, preparing for release at the Google Play Store and also Apple AppStore. I also did quite some big change on the app side, realizing that GCM actually isn’t required at all to do what the app’s objective. I were given permission to read/write on Titansoft’s TFS on this project’s server repository where I tried out doing a task, but due to failing tests, I’m still not sure whether what I did was right or wrong.
During the first half of June, there was another company-wide event, an Open Space, where anyone self-assigned a session to talk about stuff that matters to them, along with the theme of “How we help each other to improve the organization”. It was an interesting event, as everyone openly share to each other, like everyone’s position is horizontal in this company.
One of my internship highlight would be the lunch: I went out to lunch with a lot of different people almost every time (as they would seem sad when I said that I went to eat lunch alone). But mostly, the developers still talk about dev stuff during lunch, with their jargons that is specific to their work, maybe that’s why I can’t “blend in” with them, or maybe I’m just not interested on what they do, or maybe (most probably) it is my personality not to start conversation with people (and keep quiet all the time). Later in June, I started to have lunch every day with Jeslynn + UX team + Editor team. Though their choice of eating place is quite atas sometimes, I enjoyed having lunch with them as their chatter are all non-work related :)
Okay enough about internship, I’ll write about Wikimania trip on a separate post (because it’s a long story)
Pre-Wikimania, I had my parents visited me (to be more accurate, I visited them), accompanying them to shopping around, joining my dad’s reunion, and a trip to Gardens by the Bay, which started not like GBTB at all as we started from the Southern part (there are no one else here!) and slowly sightseeing the plants until finally we reached the highlight, which are the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest Dome (and there were awfully lots of people here)
Pre-Wikimania, I also experienced my last STARS Wars (course registration) as an undergraduate student (hopefully), and then I went to SCSE Software-Projects lab to setup my recently-arrived Pine A64 device. The lab technician, Mr Teo, gladly helped me in lending the HDMI cable required (I just realized that they still use VGA for the computer labs here -_-). After few hours of unsuccesful setup, though it powers on and stuff, I can’t get the Wi-Fi module to connect to my Wi-Fi router; then since I still need to pack up for my trip, I went back and start to pack up for my trip.
TL;DR I went to Wikimania 2016 held at Esino Lario, Italy. The journey from Singapore to Esino Lario took around 12-hour flight plus another 2-hour bus trip. I met some people I met before, I also met some people I never met before, I also met some people who never met my-kind of people (interesting fact: some locals took photos of me and my friends, who are Chinese, because they never see one in real life :o ) The hackathon was not productive for me, the learning day was not that much insightful for me, and the conference topics were not that interesting for me. But the most interesting things here I would say was the mayor’s daughter who were very excited when seeing Chinese people, and shouted “ni hao” (你好); she were very proud that she learned some basic Chinese Mandarin from books. Another interesting facts:
- There were a lot of #Brexit reference during this conference.
- I saw fireflies for the first time in my life
- I experienced the moment of togetherness trapped by the heaviest rain that I ever met. It rained so heavy that there were even ice spheres (they’re spherical, not cubical) mixed in the rain; and the weather at that time was really cold.
- I took a lot of video just walking around the town
What a long TL;DR :P
When I came back from Italy, I resumed my internship, after a two-day work (which are mostly fixing bugs and then pushing a new version to the store), I caught a fever + throat infection that forced me to leave work early on the third day of work after my trip. After that, it was another story continued in July.
By the way, NTUBS participated in the Awaken Challenge 2016 (at 11 June) and we got 3rd place (broken out of the samsara of having 2 years of 1st place and then 1 year of 2nd place). It was due to the hard work (seriously) of Dian, Erik, and Thomas. Seriously, how to prepare for an “exam” in just 5 weeks that require you to finish all 3 reference books (around 700 pages in total).