Nerdy Creativity

Here’s a recap of Twitter’s #HelloWorld event Feb 2.

Fabric
– add plugin to tons of third party services

Crashlytics
– 18 billion crashers per month
– used on 1.3 billlion android devices
– non fatal iOS error loggings
– support for unity
– tvOS support

answers
– show you live the events on you app
– 198 billion sessions per month
– support OS X and tvOS
– launch day experience: show summaries such as “successful release”, “low adoption”, etc

digits
– phone number verification
– find friends using phone numbers
– use email verification to switch from email login to phone login
tvOS support
– voice fallback; if after a minute the sms did not go through, send a voice call

mopub
– ad exchange
– can add custom ads from your partners
– video ads

twitter kit
– add native video

twitter
– 1 billion unique visitors
– 40% smaller js library
– curator.twitter.com: collect tweets by topic or user;
— curated collections have an id, which you can embed in any page to show the curated results

gnip
– twitter data
– see want people think of you product or related products
– Harvard used twitter data to track tweets about food poisoning to see places that make people sick
– each tweet has 65 fields; lots of data about the users

public search vs gnip
– gnip has better searches and filters
– gnip has replay to search streams back in time
– gnip searches all tweets back to 2006
– search every public as it is created

audience api
– pull statistics about a group of user ids. minimum of 10,000 ids
– can summarize interests, gender, etc of users

==

travel app powered by fabric and gnip

– list ten most tweeted attractions in a city
– show images and tweets about attractions
– show graphs of tweets per day

==

Ticketmaster

GA crash metrics were delayed several days
Twitter crashlytics can report crash within minutes

Ticketmaster mobile apps crash less than web apps during big on sale events because of the detailed crash data

disable new, buggy, slow features during large on sale events to reduce the number of crashes

use analytics to give dev team a score board
– add tracking to features so devs can know how users are using features they made

currently 57% success, 43% failure when users login;
– login failures are critical during large onsale events
– ticketmaster will simplify the log in process

Rollout new features to a select number of users
– use crash data to catch bugs before wide release
– use launch day experience data to make any adjustsments before wide release

Notes from Trails.js meetup

– create by a consultancy for rapid development
– devs moved from Sails.js to Trails.js because Sails.js development has slowed down. e.g No plans to upgrade to Express 4.
– Trials is built with ES6

– 1.0 beta is not ready for production
– production-ready 1.0 will be release in April

– currently supports express and hapi as the server, and waterline as the ORM. There is planned support for koa, bookshelf, and sequelize.
– core of Trails is pretty basic. It’s up to users to add Trailspacks for additional features such as servers and ORM.
– When you create a model, Trails automatically sets up the GET, POST, etc endpoint
– when you want to change a model, edit the schema, and restart the server. The db will be updated.

I attend a LA Software Craftsmanship Google hangout yesterday with 8th Light’s Dave Moore, one of the organizers of SCNA. Here are some notes.

– speaker: Dave Moore

8th Light
– consulting firm from Chicago
– just started L.A. office. About 10 people.

SCNA – usually in Chicago
– first time in L.A.

craftsmanship – do something really well

many people are entering dev world
– they don’t have formal training
– apprenticeship helps train people

deadline vs craftsmanship
– when you jump into existing codebase, how do can you be practice craftsman?
– clients and bosses don’t know what is possible
– up to devs to tell them what is possible in order to make quality code
– it’s ok to cut scope in order to achieve quality code

Why L.A. for the conference?
– Santa Monica have lots of startups; some are craftsman, some want to play with new toys to build cool stuff
– OC is more enterprise
– Downtown mix of startups and enterprise, plus government contracts
– there isn’t strong software craftsmanship in LA

About the conference
– organizers handpicked the speakers who have good reputation
– must-see speakers include Uncle Bob, Gary Bernhardt “destroy all software”,

These are the online courses I’m current taking. I’m gonna be busy…

The Analytics Edge Mar 3, 12 weeks, MIT

Through inspiring examples and stories, discover the power of data and use analytics to provide an edge to your career and your life.

Programming for Everybody (Python) Feb 2 – Apr 28, University of Michigan

This course aims to teach everyone to learn the basics of programming computers using Python.

An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python Feb 13 – Mar 20, Rice

This two-part course is designed to be a fun introduction to the basics of programming in Python.

Data Visualization and Infographics with D3.js Mar 16 – Apr 26, University of Texas

This course consists of an in-depth discussion about the principles of info graphics and data visualization, and how they apply to the real world.

Go Places with Spatial Analysis Mar 4 – April 15, Esri

This Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is for people who know something about data analysis and want to learn about the special capabilities of spatial data analysis.

On February 28th and March 1st, I participated in the Wonder Women hackathon. Our team came in second place for making an app that allows users to search the Los Angeles parks. This was my fourth hackathon and third time I placed in the top three. So, yay for me.

But more importantly, this was the first time I participated in a hackathon with a team. In our team of seven people, only two of us knew each other before the hackathon; the rest were total strangers. It was really cool two watch a group of strangers–each with a different skill set and skill level–come together, and contribute what they could in order to finish the app.

Even though I’ve been coding in javascript for less than a year, I was the senior programmer on the team. One of the programmers was half-way through a bootcamp, and the other team member dropped out of a bootcamp and was learning on his own. It was kinda neat being able to share what I knew with others.

What’s on the Menu? is my entry for Neo4j Winter Challenge.

As always, one of the biggest challenges when dealing with analyzing data is finding a suitable data set. After looking at beer, exoplanets, and artwork, I decided to use the menus from New York Public Library’s menu collection.

After working with sql, MongoDB, and Neo4j, I think cypher is my favorite querying language. Maybe it’s my visual background showing through, but I think it’s so freakin’ cool that the cypher query language is made of nodes and arrows.

Data is fun!

Shapes and dots

I made a simple CSS3 Animation as my first Code Pen. Who knew that dots and lines could be so difficult…and so much fun.

During a Javascript tutorial at the Women Who Code LA Meetup, someone asked how to refer to a global variable from inside a function when the function has a local variable with the same name as the global variable.

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During a job interview, I briefly mentioned to the interviewer that I had a list of things that I want to learn. I jokingly said that I would send him the list. Well, here’s the list.

I ain’t gonna lie. One of the reason’s why I anxious to get a job is so that I can narrow down the scope and figure what to learn next.

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When I applied to a super immersive, super intense program at Hack Reactor, I assumed the goal was to always aim for producing big fancy things with all these fancy doodads every single time. If your code isn’t awesome at every commit, then why commit at all?

Oh boy, was I wrong about that.

While to most people, MVP means aiming to be the best, in the coding world MVP means aiming for the minimum, as in minimum viable product.

Instead of aiming for fully functional, awesome code every single time, you should aim for a functional, simple code and keep iterating on the code until it become awesome.

Advantages of the MVP, iterative approach

1) You have working code at every step of the process. The in-progress code of might not have all the fancy doodads as the final code, but at least you have working code that will get you to where you want to be.

2) You can work on multiple simple things at the same time instead of working on one big thing. If you only work on one big thing, you have no idea if the various parts will work together. if you work on multiple small things at the same time, you can test to see how the various parts will interact with each other.

3) By aiming small, if you discover that something doesn’t work, you can throw out that small chunk of code and quickly try something else. It’s a lot less stressful to walk away from a small chunk of code than to walk away from a mountain of code that you spend tons of times on.

In conclusion, by doing less at each step, you end up being able to do more.