Week 2.... What a week

This week we were on the BBC news video below.

ok so this week was interesting. One of the graphics buys Gavin got back from his holidays and is talking about doing a logo for the app. He did one for my friend Stuart and it was bloody amazing in my view


its small there because I took it from his twitter but I think its amazingly good. he did it up in like an hour I think. I really realised how good Kainos is this week. Its not just brilliant developers they have an extremely well rounded package from the designers to developers to testers. They always make sure a product meets their amazingly high standards before being released. I am looking forward to see what they come up with for me.

This week we basically concentrated on code design, not really coding but design before we start. We identified what classes we would need and wrote the algorithms we needed to create in pseudo code. I think next week we can get down to implementation.

Week 2 at app camp

Its wednesday and I just realised I havent blogged since Saturday so I thought I would post an update.  

Kainos Reception and front door.

reflection is not obvious at all. There is a pretty building behind me though

My desk at work in Kainos. ( I cannot work without a Windows machine beside me)

Anyways this week is code design week. Its been a hard week so far because I spent practically the entire day arguing with a user interface guy about how it should be done and then thinking of how i would redesign the UI. In fairness he is right, as a software engineer we always want to do the cooler thing because, well just because. We do things because it seems cool and we are curious about finding out how to do it. The things i want to do that are super complex for me makes it more complex for the user to use. Being good to your users is important so i caved and realised he knew exactly what he was talking about and was right. 

This week I seem to be ignorant to what I should be doing. I have tasks set out by UI guy(David) and the software engineers. the software engineers things are planning and Davids things are building a prototype to test it. I decided to do Davids task first because I miss coding to be honest and I really want to get the UI down so I can move onto more pressing matters, I will off course do my tasks that are set but might leave it late and not get it done to my normal standard. 

The week is going well though, even though my original idea was destroyed it does make the app easier to make. I have been more directed to a good user experience so I will follow it.

splash screen prototype

End of week 1

So the week 1 of development is over. I cannot say that it has been all that productive. Its probably just me though because I dont feel satisfied until things actually get done. This is probably the better way but I am feeling like I am not doing anything even though I put in a load of work everyday. After lunch today being a bit of an exception.

I went a bit against the "rules" and made a bit of a prototype which actually looks nicer than I thought it would. what you are supposed to do is not that obvious so I might have to take another look into that.

Design and the way I am going to do things is basically down but I think I will actually spend the weekend doing research into all the information I need for the app. There is a lot I need to include and finding it has been a bit of a bother. Information is sometimes is blotchy so there might be information for one thing and not for other which makes it hard to build when you have a database and you are trying to categorised.

Other than that quite a good week. Big productive weekend ahead I hope.

Kainos App Camp so far...

This is my first blog post and because I have set this up fairly late I need to write a good bit of catch up.

Firstly I won a place in a very prestigious software engineering competition with Kainos Northern Ireland (kainos.com). The name of the competition was called App Camp (appcamp.co.uk) and it is for budding software engineers to learn about developing for iOS which is the operating system that is used on the Apple IPhone and IPad along with Kainos generously giving us the "kit" we need to develop on them. They gave us an Apple IPod touch and a MacBook along with all the software we need.

In order to get the place I had to go through an application procedure and an interview, then they rang me up and told me I got a place in the competition. Needless to say I was fairly ecstatic about getting a place and I was the only person from the Republic of Ireland to get a place. After we got through the application part we had to come up with app ideas and send them off to the CTO of Kainos Tom Grey, I had about 10 or so ideas and for the most part they were quite good ideas. Many of them were applicable to the app store and were fairly unique. The app store being filled with over 400'000 apps so it is difficult to come up with a winning idea that is original and doesn’t have 20 other identical apps on the App store. Tom thought some of the ideas where great which I took great pride in because he is a very respectable man who work his way up by being great at what he does to become the Chief technology officer in a large and successful company like Kainos. To have positive feedback was a major boost because I was terrified. Irrational fears of being in over my head but everything went well in the end after all. Hard work will out! So they told us we would have 2 weeks training followed by 6 weeks of development.

So everything went well and I headed off to Belfast on the 26th of june the day before I was supposed to start. there were many many hurdles in getting to Belfast between finance, transport, place to stay etc which all got worked out even though some were a very close call. App Camp started on the 27th in Queens University Belfast and boy was it something. We had 2 brilliant lecturers Luke McNeice and Tomasz Janeczko who are software engineers in Kainos itself. It is nice to work with incredible people but we were really put through our paces in my view. I thought it was going to be very hard but I couldn’t have anticipated how hard the first would be. We had to learn a new programming language(objective c), new tools (XCode) on an unfamiliar operating system OSX. I felt like they really had thrown us in at the deep end. By the 3rd day we had made simple games and learned a good amount of the language. I learned more in that first week than I think I have ever learned in one week in my life. It was so intense but you really just had to soldier on through it. I couldn’t give up. I had invested too heavily in it to just give up and go home and at the same time my need to learn was telling me just keep going you will get through it. and I did. I did quite well too, we had 2 mini competitions the first was to create a game, my partner and I created just a simple black jack game and people voted our app to second place which was great and in the 2nd week we had to create a Restaurant app and my team was voted first. I'm not too sure if the 2nd week was easier or I just knew everything a lot better but I was doing well.

 

After the 2 weeks of training we got a week off for the 12th in the north. I had nothing to do in Belfast and my family was annoying me to come home for a visit so I did, I had a boring week but the R&R was nice since I was fairly wrecked after the 2 weeks of training.  I got to see some of my friends and headed back to Belfast on the Saturday before we were due back.

So now I have finally gotten onto this week. Week one of development is basically design week. We are designing UI(user interfaces) and other design based things that all engineers need to look at before they start a project. We have had 2 presentations this week and presentation is something I have had to work hard on this past year in college. I had to do many and I think I am finally getting used of them. No more butterflies is great. I am building stuff to try and get the word out there which is why I am finally getting around to blogging. Today I also have to set up a Facebook, Twitter and Google plus account to try and have lots of places to get in contact with potential users and hopefully get some constructive feedback from them as I go along. If you have managed to get through this entire blog post so far I say well done. I will have shorter ones from now on this is just catch up really. In the next I hope to explain what I will be doing for the week 5 weeks before I go back to Sligo to college. Please subscribe.