DEV Community: Jose Tomas Gonzalez

Route to second place at Facebook's Hackathon Chile 2018

Jose Tomas Gonzalez — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 13:48:36 +0000

First of all, congratulations to Facebook for doing an amazing event such as the one this April 14-15th. Hackathons are not only a space for competing but also a space to think, learn, share, meet new people and have a great time!

It all started when Facebook sent an email inviting us to participate to their annual hackathon at Chile. The hype was huge, some teammates and I participated last year and it was such a really good experience that we wanted to participate on this year's hackathon at almost any cost.

But first... What is a hackathon?

In the software development world, hackathons are a "competition" that consists of starting and finishing a project in (normally) a 24-hour time gap. The idea behind this is to explore what can be done by the teams in such a short period of time, discover new ideas and most of all have a fun time hacking.

Starting a project?

Gathering a team is a key point because team-work is the base of hackathons, the hurry forces teammates to split tasks and responsibilities and only a good and organized team will be able to succeed. This usually is the most difficult part of a hackathon because teams must also come up with an idea that is interesting enough to attract the judge attention but small enough to be able to develop it in 24 hours.

Once the team comes up with an idea, activities, food and lots of caffeine are brought to keep eryone alive during the day and night. The Facebook team are experts at keeping their participants with a good mood and providing an excellent environment.

It must be finished!

As time passes, the teams are challenged with development situations that must be handled at a minimum time cost. My obsession with clean code is always challenged here because you have to do almost anything to finish your project. It's fun to see the hacks that teams come up with, just to solve problems that in other situations would have taken more time.

Not everything is code

The most important part of a hackathon is presenting your project! All that effort that transformed your idea into a project must be shown in order for others to see and appreciate what the team managed to put together. Also explaining the idea, usefulness and impact are key items to succeed.

In short, what the team and I did?

First we named Mobike Avengers because an internal joke with Mobike, the city's public bike system. Since nobody on the team had ever developed VR we still we managed to develop a fully functional VR classroom in 24 hours in which students were able to connect to a webpage using their cellphones, a VR headset and see a screen on one of the virtual walls displaying the webcam of the teacher. Also the teacher could trigger timed quizzes and students had to interact with virtual items to choose the correct answer.

The presentation had to be inclusive, because half of the judges were not programmers. The team had two minutes to present the project in a way that showed the technical complexity behind but also the usefulness and/or impact of the idea. Some teams had amazing projects, but failed when presenting them.

After all that, the team and I managed to get the second place and an awesome backpack courtesy of Facebook. My last Facebook Hackathon as a student since I will be out of University by January, but an awesome experience that I recommend to everyone interested!

Original article posted at my Linkedin

What little things make you happy while coding?

Jose Tomas Gonzalez — Sat, 24 Feb 2018 20:15:20 +0000

I must say refactoring code to make it look beautiful is my guilty pleasure

Code for all

Jose Tomas Gonzalez — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 21:15:55 +0000

Code is for developers as languages are for countries, there are zones were even speaking the same language, you will hardly understand one thing or two.


const a = true;
const b = true;

const something = a && b;

if (something) {
    const text = "Its because is well coded (???)";
    console.log(text);
}

Putting just a bit of effort you can communicate so why not do the same with coding?


const isWellCoded = true;
const didYouTakeYourTime = true;

const youCanReadThis = isWellCoded && didYouTakeYourTime;

if (youCanReadThis) {
    const whyCanYouReadThis = "Its because is well coded";
    console.log(whyCanYouReadThis);
}

Once a teacher said to me,

Code must be written in a way that is easy to read. You should spend your effort in understanding what it does not in what is says.

If you are committed, after some practice you stop thinking on the quality because it comes out of your mind pre-formatted.

Stop killing kittens

Jose Tomas Gonzalez — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 21:22:31 +0000

First of all, this is the second time that i wrote this article. Lost the first one because didn't hit "save post" shame on me.

At college we had a course called "Code quality and software verification" that teaches you how to avoid (as the teacher said) killing kittens. Every code atrocity kills a poor innocent kitten, and it gets buried in your personal kitten graveyard.

My first kill (not proud) was

var asdf = 12

So time flies and you start working as a developer for a business company, they have a web app that shows it clients their accounts and how their money was being invested by your company.

Your boss assigns you the task of developing a new module "The Hyper Calculator of Something 4000". You know how it should work but that's all, you have no idea for what it will be used for. Coding happens and since time is money, you give the luxury of killing some kittens. One here, some over there.

After delivery you have about 5000 lines of questionable quality code but the important part is that works and made your boss happy. All good for me!

Then caos happens, your mystery module starts crashing and giving unexpected values, the company clients think that their money is gone. Your boss is exasperated that you are taking so long to fix the bug because, you wrote the module, it's your code!!

You have your hand on the mouse, ready to click over a file but.. "it was the asdf.py or the finalVersion003.py" you start opening files, looking inside your spaghetti code, digging between kitten bones, using the debugger until you manage to raise an exception VOILÁ!!! wait no.. the console says "Exception occurred" that is some very useful piece of information (not).

Your dead kittens are coming for you and you have nothing to do to fight them. Clients start to leave the company and your boss trying to help you looks your code and finds your graveyard, a cleaner code would have enabled you to solve the problem faster and lost less clients. So he gets so mad because that you get fired.

The problem with coding is that it's almost impossible to code without creating bugs, it's something that you will have to live with.

Bugs live in your code and feed on your dead kittens, the more kittens, the stronger will be your bugs. Well not the bug itself but you get the idea.

Code quality is used not because it's bad killing kittens, but because your dead kittens will rise against you and the ones close.

Protect yourself of those zombie kittens.

It's just a Barn.

Jose Tomas Gonzalez — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 02:47:35 +0000

(Extreme Drama ahead)
So, let start with a story. All your life you lived in a farm and if there is something that a farm teaches you, is that you can do it yourself. With all that knowledge you consider yourself great builder, in the past you built an amazing tree house for your kids and they loved it.

Now your old barn needs a replacement, the new barn will host every animal on your farm. Since you are a great builder, you take the challenge and build the barn by yourself. Design, execution and delivery are your tasks.

TODO:

Design:

The barn will be over wood posts because are strong enough, the barn is not that heavy.

For the inner structure it will use a metal rods, with less beams and pillars it will be lighter and we can do that since metal is stronger than wood.

The barn cover will use PVC siding, light, maintenance free and cheap.

For the roof we will use Zinc Tiles, polymer ones wouldn't resist the winter.

Execution:

You start by burying the wood posts. Everything goes according as planned.

After that you build the inner metal structure, it takes some time because metal is harder to work with but a good weld you manage to keep everything in place.

You start covering the barn with your PVC siding when a storm interrupts your work. You go inside and wait it passes. The next day you realize that all your metal structure got wet (because you prioritized the siding over the roof) and with the passing of the days a superficial but visible rust appears all over your new structure. Never mind, it's harmless because it's the rust is superficial and can't destroy the structure.

You finally got to the roof. Your barn is ready!

Delivery:

You move all your animals from the old barn to the brand new one! After that you dismantle the old barn and make (a lot) of fire wood for the incoming winter.

Everyone is happy.

Winter has come

Insert Game Of Thrones dramatic music

In winter you start noticing that with strong storms, the water hits the roof too hard and since it's Zinc (metallic) tiles a loud sound is made. Your animals get terrified on every strong storm. You had no idea that water could hit a roof that hard and decide to replace the roof with a stronger (and quieter) material.

After solving that minor incident, time passes and your barn survives the hard winters. You still think, i am a great builder!

Your barn was doomed since the beginning. Your wood posts started rotting, until now they were able to sustain the light barn, but the water made some (huge) damage over the years. You consider disassembling the barn to replace the wood posts with concrete ones that are not that expensive. BUT (remember the metal structure?) it's all welded up, so disassembling will take even more time. You (luckily have spare time) and decide to perform the ~~refactor~~ ups, the repair of your barn until you notice that you have no place to store all your animals and will die outside in the winter.

The problem with Software Development is that anyone can code, anyone can build a barn. You can have a code with some rust, no one is perfect; you can have a noisy code that is not that efficient, but when you get clients stepping all over your rotted wood posts things start getting unstable and finally they will run away before everything falls down.

Everyone knows that there is something called Code Quality but not everyone knows that metal tiles make loud noises under strong rain. Clean code is a phrase (i hope) very familiar with most Software Developers but architecture, performance, scalability, testing and refactoring may not.

So be barned warned

If you think that "it's just code" do something for your future you (and co-workers) and investigate the topic. You will not regret building with concrete in the right occasions and with wood in others.

(Extreme drama aside)
What do you think about knowing that Code Quality is important and spending extra-time refactoring that piece of code?

Mr. Dalton, the story of an impossible App

Jose Tomas Gonzalez — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 04:58:05 +0000

After about two months of reading articles from dev.to i finally registered and gathered motivation for writing my own article.

Prepare yourself because the following lines will be the Hello World of Hello Worlds, the always-true-condition in your while function, the correct indentation in your python script. So hold on to your standing desk and prepare to be amazed.

OK, maybe the hype was too much but i'm committed to share a fun and long story that just got on the road again this past Friday.

How Mr. Dalton was born...

As about the 10% of the male people in this world i am colorblind, that means that technically i have trouble with red and green colors. In reality, that color confusion applies to almost every color. What does this relate to a developer community? you will see...

Almost every day when dressing up during high school my outfit colors didn't match according to the fashion police (Ak. my mom) so i had to go back and change clothes. As being a student and with all the boom of mobile apps ('08 - '09) i hoped that the saying "there is an app for that" applied to my situation. Spoiler alert: it did not. Taking the matter on my own hands, made a mockup of my ideal app and stored on a folder in my room for long time because at that time, i had never touched a single line of code.

Then... fate kicked in!

After 3 years my young-me was at university studying to become a Software Developer (here in Chile, you start studying Civil Engineering and after 2 years you start on a specialty). I thought that i could now create my long-dreamed iOS app to avoid changing clothes twice every day for life. Took my computer and just after creating the new X-Code project BAM! protocols, API, http requests, async threads, scalable design, core data, databases, and a loooong list of things that i never heard of. I've got so frustrated because i thought that i would never be able to learn that much. So Mr. Dalton went again back to the same folder it was stored since '08.

Courses passed by, knowledge came to me and a Facebook Hackathon was the trigger for the final result. Facebook as you know, made a hackathon on april in Chile. With a team of four we made an iOS app with an API backend and a WebApp to shop with a tinder-like card system. We did not win (sadly) but in 48 hours i learnt more of iOS components than in 2 years.

The final countdown

That same semester i was taking an Artificial Vision course. Talking with my teacher Mr. Dalton came to my mind and asked him if the course would give me the knowledge to identify correctly colors of clothes. He said yes and i felt a little closer to my own app. A week later, my teacher said in class that we had to choose a project for the rest of the course. As i was looking though the options Mr. Dalton figured on it with my name assigned at one side. I've was (thankfully) forced to develop Mr. Dalton if i wanted to pass my AV course.

Long story short, Mr. Dalton was developed at July of 2017. Fully capable of matching clothes and ready for publishing. As a normal student, USD99 is not a small amount of money to pay, specially for a developer account. After 3 months of neglecting my duty to share Mr. Dalton with that 10% of colorblind people in this world, i was finally publishing it and for my surprise was accepted at the first try this Friday!

Looking back

As a Software Developer Student i have learnt some valuable lessons with Mr. Dalton that i would like to share with you.

A new project in a new platform will look hard or impossible to accomplish if it's your first time doing it.
Motivation is key. At the Facebook Hackathon i was so motivated to deliver a good project that those limitations like "is impossible" went away and delivered an "impossible" app.
Even if Mr. Dalton is not perfect, it's the result of your passions, that's the idea of a side project. You can always use time to fix or upgrade something of it.

If someone is interested in Mr. Dalton i will be happy to have a conversation.

Finally i would like to ask you, do you have an "impossible" project that you are proud of sharing?