A casual mixer celebrating Eid and beyond
August might be a slow month in Jeddah. In no ways, however, it could slow down our idea flows within the Facebook Developer Circle: Jeddah nor dampen our desire to meet new friends. Yesterday, we gathered at an Arabic (yes, don’t be fooled by the name) cafe and had a long table breakfast.
Faces old and new mingled, where defense contractors meet sophomores in college, dancing around topics from camel milk to camelCase, to everyone’s favorite TV series, and a rift between the Ruby aficionados and Pythonistas.
Jokes interspersed by power shortage at…
How to design and build a personalized social workout schedule and stick to it using invision, vue.js, and dexie
Why I do this?
I never exercise, ever. Now I find a way to exercise, and I want it to stick.
Back in college, I took ballroom dancing and “walking and jogging” to fulfill my physical education credits. Yes, walking, that’s a class where you walk around in circles in the field 6 times then sign-off. It’s the class for a person who never exercises like me, and I was not alone.
Going to exercise is not hard, really. You show up, you do it…
DevCJeddah Augmented Reality Evening 2018
It’s a mid-summer night. The developers of Jeddah, Makkah, Taif, and Rabigh gathered at the Vibes Offices with enthusiastic startup founders and designers. RSVP’ed members new and old, by-standers who got dragged along, and tenants of the co-working space that has been our home for multiple events… We came together to celebrate the launch of the 9/10th accelerator’s latest cohort plus a fun hands-on evening of Facebook Augmented Reality.
Most CRUD app development work boils down to effective data visualization and affording users an intuitive user interface (UI) to curate their data. The same can be said about database management, especially for your non-tech savvy client, who does everything on a spreadsheet. This got me thinking:
What if we can build a database for our user-facing app using a data management tool that is familiar to our clients?
The answer is a cloud-based spreadsheet solution that has an API, in other words, Google Sheets.
GSAD makes everyone happy
Using Google Sheets as a Database (GSAD), you’ll get the following for free:
- App owner…
I had a dream, that one day, my single page applications (SPA) will live free of (hosting) hostage, where they are no longer manually deployed, and have proper (domain) names. Not until this day, I have found the way plowing through my pet project, and I am going to share it with you in a hands-on, concise way, so your SPA too may be set free.
Assume you already have a project repo, we’d need to take care of a few things:
- a domain name
- a place to host your code and the deployed web app
- a service to auto-deploy…
DevCJeddah Build Day 2018
Developers from Jeddah, Mecca, and Rabigh gathered at the Vibes Offices on the last Thursday in June, 2018. Some came to learn about the Community Challenge, some came for an interactive workshop on ReactJS. Yet, we were all there for the fellowship and communion of code in celebration of the spirit of co-creation, or in modern lingual, hacking.
Three days before Ramadan in 2018, the Jeddah Legal Hackers held their first gathering. Jameson from the global Legal Hackers movement opened the discussion with a call to legal innovation and showcased various successes worldwide. We then had some impassioned discourse amongst lawyers and technologists, breaching the veil of drastically distant perspectives on topics related to the GDPR, AI, blockchain, and many more. We were also very fortunate to have perspectives from law firm partners, in-house counsels, academics, technology consultants, and students in both law and technical fields.
Why do our technical clients think we are against them while our…
From the last episode
There was a challenge: How to answer mundane legal questions accurately in least time and effort?
Our first guess is … a chatbot.
A chatbot is a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface.
A chat interface seems a natural fit for the challenge:
- It would have a question-answering capability, akin to one that legal clients would expect to have in writing or consultation.
- It is powered by some knowledge base, hopefully consistent and up-to-date as an incorporation lawyer strives to maintain.
In collaboration with our partner, we charted out the…
This is the first in the series that documents the journey of Qanoon, a legaltech project at the Taqadam Accelerator cohort II hosted at the KAUST EC. I am the tech co-founder and will jot notes on the binary side of things, while my law partner, Iman, will share her observations on the intricate web of humans and law encountered on our journey.
The Beginning
Qanoon’s premise is simple.
Why do we have overqualified lawyers wasting time in mundane paperwork while there’s a line of clients waiting to be served face-to-face?
Our task is to decompose/disentangle legal works such that the lawyers…
DevC Jeddah Workshop on Python
The votes are in! The Jedis of the Developer Circle in Jeddah are eager to explore the trending field of Data Science. Off we go to the planning of a workshop for this month… From past events, we learned that:
- Hands-on workshops > Technical talks
- Understanding of fundamentals > long-winded hand-holding
- Self-contained dev env > hair-pulling setups
Based on these observations, here’s a set of design requirements for a palatable first data science experience:
- Interesting small problem: the participants should feel intrigued at the source material they deal with, from start to end.
- Concepts on-the-go: they should be able to…
Andrew Yip
phd student @kaust_news | data science enthusiast | tech community builder
