Azimo Labs - tech team behind Azimo joins open source community
Computer software became integral part of many fields in life - even those which are not directly connected with computer science. It’s not a lie to say that software development is probably one of the fastest growing area in the world. As an example let’s take a look at mobile development in a last few years. Since 2007 (1st gen. iPhone release), to now AppStore has more than 1.5 million apps.
Android market is even bigger — starting from 2008 (first release of Google Play Store), until now we have more than 2 million apps. Even if some of them are poor quality those numbers are still amazing.
But the more important are possibilities given by the apps. A couple years ago sending images via email, directly from your mobile device was something really big. To make it work probably a number of programmers had to spend weeks or months building from a scratch camera app, email client and integrations between them. And only these if we assume that hardware, drivers, operating system and much more were already delivered.
Now to build something similar we would need no more than a weekend (or a couple hours on hackathon). Today software is so advanced that you can tell your glasses to take a photo which will be automatically uploaded to the cloud and available almost instantly on all connected devices. You can ask (out loud) your car to draw a route on map to the closest shop but before you can make a call to the seller keeping your hand on steering wheel.
You can start playing music on your TV from your smartphone and control it by your watch.
Thanks to Azimo you can transfer money around the world in a short time, sitting on a couch with a laptop on your knees or moving through the city with a mobile device in your hand. You can control your home — bulbs, alarm, plants watering system, even fridge or washer with a smart modules like Particle. You can summon your car parked in garage. And the list of possibilities is endless…
Have you ever wondered what makes computer science area so fast growing ? We believe that the huge impact on this has the open source community.
The biggest beauty of being a software developer is that you live around the people who love to share — their knowledge, their experience, their tools. Sometimes just simple hints or answers for less experienced colleagues, sometimes very hard work — whole modules or projects ready to plug-in to your software. And no one here asks you for the money. Because we all were (or will be soon) in situation that someone else’s code saved hours or days of our work.
Let’s see how it works in the real life. Here, at Azimo we’ve built our Android app codebase on top of many open source projects:
- Dagger 2 — dependency injection framework from Google (formerly from Square). Thanks to it our code architecture is clean, modular, easy to test and scalable.
- RxJava — library for composing asynchronous and event-based apps from Netflix which makes this multithreading understandable and easy to handle, even by newcomers.
- OkHttp, Retrofit — libs for networking from Square which helps us keeping standards in connection between our app and API.
…and much, much more. The list is very long but what is the most important here, thanks to open source projects, instead of reinventing the wheel — networking, async calls or code architecture patterns we could focus in 100% on business logic. Logic which solves the real problems of the real people. Thanks to it we have enough time to think how to deliver money from United Kingdom to Nigeria, from Germany to Philippines. How to make it fast and pleasant for people from all over the world.
But now it’s our turn. We don’t want to be only an open source consumers. To make this community constantly growing we also decided to give something from us.
We are very proud to say that AzimoLabs, tech team behind Azimo comes to light. We are going to have active commitment in this amazing community. We want to share — our code and our knowledge.
Everyone starts somewhere, and so we start here. We’ve just published 3 open source projects for Android development:
Also soon we’ll host Google I/O 2016 Extended event in our office in Cracow. If you will be around feel free to drop by and grab a beer or coke. Together with our friends from other companies we will talk about our experiences with Google technologies (in mobile and web) and later we’ll watch Google I/O Keynote streaming.
But no worries if you can’t be with us on this event. Because this is just the beginning. We are planning to share more projects, knowledge and host dev-meetups to see each other here more often!
Just stay in touch with us — here at Medium, follow us on Twitter: @AzimoLabs and keep watching our Github account. We are happy to invite all of you to contribute in this amazing community. Community of freedom and sharing. Just to make a world the better place. Day by day, line of code after line.
