hackathon

5 June 2016

Since the last time I posted in mid-May 2016, I have been going through three weeks of internship at Titansoft. The company occupies the whole level 2 and level 3 of that building (not that big, but also not that small). On my first day, I had a briefing in the morning by the Operations department, and then a tour of the office. The department where I belong, Developer department, is situated on level 3, the whole level 3 is Developer department.

In this internship, I was embarked on a project to develop a mobile apps. So far, I have been resisting to develop mobile apps (because I believed in webapps since it can be accessed across different platforms) but when I was told to do so in C# using Xamarin.Forms, I was very delighted. This is because I have been wanting to develop something in Xamarin platform for quite some time, but haven’t found an idea to work on seriously. My first day of internship was spent on setting up the PC, downloading Xamarin and lots of SDKs. I was also given an Android smartphone for trying the app in a real device, and a Macbook to connect to my PC so that Xamarin can build and simulate iOS apps.

So far the development was alright, I was quite surprised when my supervisor commented on my coding style that did not conform with C# naming style (as I did not know previously and just typed everything in lowerCamelCase except for class name where I use UpperCamelCase). Turned out that in C#, the default was UpperCamelCase for everything except parameter name; and freestyle for local variable name.

Visual Studio was a really nice IDE due to its IntelliSense. Due to this, I don’t really need to remember which “using” I need to put before coding.

During these three weeks of internship, there was a department-wide event, called “Red Friday”, a kind of hackathon. It started with us playing Story Cubes (https://www.storycubes.com/) to kickstart out creativity in developing ideas later on. In idea generation period, I observed quietly, and I realized that there were a lot of internal jargons (presumably the product or server name) that I do not know about. Then the teams worked on the idea using a technique which they named “TOPS” (Titansoft One-page Problem Solving), for describing the idea in a QBQ-way, breaking down the ideas into smaller parts, identifying the subproblems relationships, solution pros and cons, and then the summary. Seems like a lot of trouble in solving a problem, but as my department manager told us, a problem well described is already half-solved.

In this Red Friday, I was inclined to the Executive Assistant’s idea of revamping the internal book library borrowing and returning system. Basically, what we did is implementing TOPS to solve the problem.

At the end of the day, all of the teams were called back and we were told to “show, not tell” what we have done for the day. And then the Red Friday was closed with a small sharing session.

I also joined the company-wide bowling session at The Chevron, Jurong East. This time, I did not know why but I missed the pins a lot. But I finally striked at almost the end of the game.

Company-aside, there was NTUBSA Vesak Celebration two hours after the bowling session ended, I rushed to LBSCC (at Marsiling) and no one is there yet but the NTUBSA people, doing AGM. I observed quietly their AGM process which is very chill. After that, the Vesak celebration preparation was started. The dinner was quite unique, it was Thai vegetarian buffet, but the rice was blue! The Vesak celebration highlight was Venerable Chuan Guan giving talk, where he shared his thought around the theme, Bodhi.

Other thing aside, the preparation for Awaken Challenge has now been more intensive. I realized that it was lacking behind, but let’s hope for the best.