Make Day Alpha-Zulu

Published in

Retro Rabbit

6 min readOct 15, 2018

How did I hear about Make Day

Many moons ago before becoming a rabbit :) I got an email from one of the developer recruitment company marketing manager (Offerzen) with an opportunity to harness my skills and have a look see what other developers in my region are getting up to.

The Catch?

Turns out not every email has a click bait all over them I just had to simply apply for a free ticket and wait for the confirmation email whether I was going to Make Day or Not (this time round), luckily enough I got to GO to Make Day.

What I will be doing.

On Make Day I will learn how to build Augmented Reality Apps on Root insurance along side a group of keen developers. The aim is to explore and learn new things and it caters for varying levels of experience and be able to learn different things using the same tools.

Tools to learn about at conference.

Unity
Vuforia
Root Insurance API

My Make Day

As expected the environment was super informal and very techy indeed. Upon my arrival I took a snap of myself (head & shoulders) and pinned myself onto the MAKE wall of FAME.

After that I took to the machine that saves a Developer’s life on the daily (COFFEE MACHINE) very accessible & the day was covered.

Introductions

Introductions were very interactive and allowing everyone to break the ice around stand-up and going around in turns. To hear what people are doing and what they define as their passion in their different disciplines was really encouraging. The environment was really really open for expression and I too had to share what my passion for doing what I do is and what I am most interested in learning in my career as a software developer. In high level I expressed my passion in 3 distinct attributes which I hold dearly to my heart which are Help people with what I build (Software). Provide solutions to problem(s) that the people I am helping may have, last but not least Produce working software that will be the answer and aid for the people who need it most and this underlines my core values which is helping the world a better place with helping one person at a time.

Theme of the Day

The theme was basically around Augmented Reality. We had a very interactive intro session outlining the whole philosophy of Make-Day basically in 2D fashion Make is part of Offerzen and they want to enable Developers (Makers) to start the culture of Learning that is outside of the norm. Getting a group of Makers to be thrown into a discomfort zone and also be able to play with new technology and ide to make something for the first time (not the last) in their career in turn this will spark many questions like (What if) to more Makers and as a result more developers start building cool stuff. I have to say I made a pretty good case study for the above, as AR and gaming development in its entirety had never been in my radar in terms of things to build. However I have been preaching to myself that I can learn almost anything within my field and this was one of the steps which will accelerate me to actually practice what I preach in a sense.

Down to Business

The emphasis was more on Learning rather than pressurize ourselves to getting to the Finish product of what we wanted to build.

We had to build an insurance app that will be able to Quote a client based on items which are coverable (Not already damaged, Actually exist & are termed insured_items) using the Root Insurance Api.

As the above task seemed to be very high level and had no structure that’s the exact atmosphere which does not mitigate the ability for one to explore means that will get the deliverable or bottom line realized in terms of building the app through Unity and using Vuforia for database storage and communicating with the Root Insurance API.

The Experience

In all honesty I was firmly comfortable with the Root Insurance API. To make my experience even better the api documentation is easy to understand and setup. We also utilized POSTMAN for querying methods exposed by the API. The learning curve was basically Unity, Vuforia and the whole concept of augmented reality this was expected and it’s why I attended MAKE Day to learn & explore.

Unity game engine — setup was fairly straightforward and the integration with Vuforia was a simple click on a list of packages. Well the big emphasis was the BUILD part and that was a huge learning experience. I must elaborate that the course guide (provided upon successful entry to MAKE Day) were really helpful . Being a newbie to gaming development I could understand what I was doing on MAKE day as the course guide has material such as Dojo Videos (tutorial done by other makers) that can get one up to speed.

Reflecting on the day

The community is forever expanding and it is very open the stand-up and couch talks gets one to break out of their shell. At the end of the day we had a mini retro session to reflect on the day and how it could be made better. In general the MAKE session really changed the majority of our perspective of what we were going to do on the day. The only time we had to sit and listen to a presentation was at the introduction stage and after that it was peer to peer open discussions and of course building the apps.

Having different approaches to solving problems in our society forces one to step out of their comfort zone and sometimes stretch our capabilities in to new platforms and learn as you build.

I had fun and the whole day I was concentrated on learning and funny how time was flying but we were assured that come-backs are very much welcomed and also sharing the word-of-mouth with our colleagues is encouraged. Currently MAKE offers ticket grabs on their MAKE website which is sponsored by ROOT to the value of R5850.00 which is running till December however the tickets can be purchased for MAKE day to the same value mentioned above.