mClinica hosts PD Meetup 1010
Programmers, Developers is an active local tech community on Facebook with over 200,000 members. The group was created for all the programmers and developers to help to solve each others tech-related problems or questions. Now, this Facebook community is not only limits helping online, they are now actively conducting a free event for the tech community arranged by the admins and volunteers. Recently, September 21, 2019, they successfully organised a free event, the PD Meetup 1010, sponsored by mClinica.
Over 20 people composed of mobile developers, web developers, students, quality assurance analysts, and others attended this event.
Four interesting topics was successfully discussed by the speakers:
Choosing the Accurate PowerBI
There are a lot of different kind of developers exists in the field of technology. Mr Argelo stated that one of the rarest type of a developer is the Business Intelligence Developer. Business Intelligence Developer is responsible for designing and developing Business Intelligence (BI) solutions through visualisation and reports by using set of data queries.
He walk through about the dos and don’ts in creating graphs and charts to enhance the readability of these graphical reports of a business by using an interactive data visualisation tool, the Power BI, a business service analytics by Microsoft.
In creating such analytics, there are three most commonly used graphs and these are the following:
- Bar
- Line
- Pie
Creating each graph has a certain process. Knowing your reader, customer, or client’s nationality or background can make your visualisation more comprehensive. And also answering questions like “What?”, “Who?”, “Where?”, “When?”, “Why?”, and “How many?” will be very helpful to emphasise the report you want to elaborate to the reader.
Mr. Argelo pointed that Power BI make it easier to build an analytics like this. He demonstrated using the Power BI tool on how to use it and turn your thousands of data exported from any databases, excel files, APIs, and others, to a graphical visualisation without difficulty.
Building a Machine Learning API using Java on Azure App Service for Containers
Machine learning is one of those topics where people are easily getting interested on, not because of its word itself. With the idea of progressively learning your application by itself using different complex algorithms is very helpful for some people. Generally, it has many uses and can be applied in our everyday lives, even in work. For this session, Mr. John Ada, a data engineer at IBM, explained how it works. He pointed out that there must be a prepared data set, and a number of applied rules sets to be able to come up with a promising and valid result. The most interesting part of his session is he’s using Java language for his demo.
In his demo, he’s used Spring Web framework with a single API that can read Base64 data of a photo and calculate it using Deeplearning4j, resulting to a JSON result of labels with its probability value. With training data sets are already prepared, the API will able to identify which is more relevant in terms of probability value. He used dog breeds as an example.
After that, he now demonstrates on how to create a container using Docker, and upload it to Azure App Services. Due to time constrains, he wasn’t able to successfully upload a working container.
Creating real-time and cross-platform mobile game using Firebase and Flutter
Cross-platform development emerges as it help to decrease the cost and increase the speed of development of a certain project. There are different tools that can be considered to make this possible, one of those is Flutter.
“Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.” — Google
Mr. Joshua emphasized the beauty of Flutter; Its faster development because of stateful hot reload feature, the expressive and flexible UI by allowing the user to fully customised the UI without sacrificing the native feel of the application. He also demonstrated on how to create a mobile game application with real-time interaction and update using Flutter with the help of Firebase. He prototyped a chess game that let the user to play with other user by joining a created room.
Although Flutter introduced new programming language called Dart, he proved that with just a several lines of code, it is easy to create an efficient application with impressive user interface and animation.
How not to cook Spaghetti and Meatballs
Metaphorical discussion was used in this talk to relate the structure of Spaghetti and Meatballs to a non-structured coding practices.
Ms. MJ specified the anatomy of the Spaghetti and Meatballs.
- Pasta — redundancies of functions/methods, constants, etc.
- Sauce — unnecessary libraries
- Meatball — scattered modules
- Plate — IDE
- Fork — tool to enter the dungeon
Some of the causes of the Spaghetti and Meatballs are:
- Legacy project programmed by different people and generation without any documentations or architecture.
- Narrowed timeline
- Cramming
And the result is obviously chaotic. Fortunately, there is a definite solution of these problems — Software Architecture.
Software architecture will be very helpful to design and organise a certain project to produce a reliable, maintainable, scalable, and reusable output.
She also discussed and compared some of the popular Software Architectural Pattern in mobile and web development that can be used as a guide — Model View Controller (MVC), Model View Presenter (MVP), and Model View View-Model (MVVM).
The verdict of which is the best among these three architectural patterns depends on the scope of the project you are working on where the team sees its feasibility considering all the factors of the development cycle.
Overall, the event was really great and informative. Speakers were generously shared their ideas and masteries to the attendees. Free! snacks! are! also! provided! UwU
Looking for a career opportunity? Our company is still hiring for Developers and Quality Assurance Engineers at our office in Taguig, Philippines. View more of our vacant positions here. Referrals are appreciated!
Or if you’re looking for event sponsors, our organization may be available! We’ve already hosted Women Who Code Manila, Swift Philippines, Manila JavaScript, QE-360, Product Philippines, and Programmers Developers. Email us here.
