DEV Community: wiz

Why should I use react native for mobile app development ?

wiz — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 05:01:42 +0000

I know React already, hence I am thinking of developing an application in native. I am not sure whats the pros/cons of choosing that over android/java ?

I need some help on:

Understanding those pros/cons ?
How can I maintain my application in a long run ?
Resources to delve more into native
Are there any better options than native ? (heard of capacitor ??)

Thanks!

What are SaaS and PaaS?

wiz — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 10:31:35 +0000

I kept on hearing these terms and I cannot understand. Most recently I heard using BaaS as a PaaS. Kindly help to understand these. Also, I have a doubt like how kubernetes and docker related to these. Are they related?

Thanx!

Grace Hopper Celebration India 2018

wiz — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 16:49:54 +0000

There is no expiry date for dreams

-Geetha Kannan (MD, AnitaB.org)

Grace Hopper Celebration India commenced on November 14, 2018.
The conference by name and by spirit devotes to women in computing by providing an exposure to the tech workforce which includes career opportunities, a huge professional network, technical talks, motivational keynotes and several tracks related to tech and non-tech to participate into.

I participated in this three-day conference as a student scholar. The crowd remarked some great insights by having 99% women against 1% men, 401 organisations and around 5000 people. I had never admitted such a massive and diverse crowd. I felt like a free bird, meeting all sort of personalities, no cabins, no appointments and no pending emails. It was so cool!

Keynotes

Here are my takeaways from the keynotes:

Keynote Speaker, Lori Beer

Lori Beer is the Global Chief Information Officer (CIO) of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and a member of the firm’s Operating Committee. She is responsible for the firm’s technology systems and infrastructure worldwide.
She shared her career journey so far and the way she ended up as a CIO. Also answered the queries of professional mothers and told how she balanced her career and upbringing of the kids.

Focus on T shaped skills Our skills should be in "T shape". That means for some skills we require deep understanding and know all the nitty-gritty and at the same time, we should expand our areas of reach and knowledge, thereby covering the breadth too. I never heard such a term before!!
Women underestimate themselves a lot Be confident and do not undermine your capabilities. She shared a fact that women underestimate themselves 30% from what they are actually.
Get out of your comfort zone She shared that she never knew or had the aim of becoming a CTO. She subsequently took all roles that came her way and constantly push herself to do more and more.
Be prepared, know the skills She stressed the fact that when you don't have the skills you will get uncomfortable. So be prepared and learn the skills before playing.

Keynote Speaker, Vaishali Kasture

Vaishali Kasture is the co-founder of Sonder Connect, a not-for-profit organization that mentors women founders. She shared her 25 years of experience of working in Banking and Financial Services. Also titled as the first Indian woman to complete all 6 world major marathons!

We are more than ourselves Sharing her experience, she told how she overcame doubting herself when she was offered a post or some great opportunity. She suggested that we are more than what we think about ourselves. We just don't realize it ourselves.
Take feedbacks Know what you are doing by asking from your peers and seniors. The idea is simple: if you are not doing any mistakes, you are not learning!
Be optimistic as a leader, people look to you Talking about the "Financial Crisis 2008", Vaishali shared her experience of handling the situation. The employees of her firm were in a panic and doubted about their jobs. In spite of not having solid plans then, as a leader, she made them rest assured about their jobs and stopped them from leaving the firm. Later on, with her and her team's hard work, the firm sustained the effect. The fact is your people look for you when a state of emergency or crisis appears. As a leader, if you fail to be mentally stable then other people lose hope too and things start breaking thereafter.
Prepare an elevator pitch! What is your brand? She stressed on preparing an elevator pitch while introducing yourself to somebody. You should know who you are and what you want people to know about you. It is knowing your brand.
Understand the industry Mentioned the importance of knowing the trends in the market. Like market is now towards containerisation rather than VMs.
Push yourself out of your comfort zone every day This is a really cool mantra that I noted from the keynote. She is a marathon champ and was giving a talk to tech people when she herself is a non-tech person. She remarked that a product of this mantra of going out of the comfort zone.

She ended the talk with the phrase:

There is a special place in hell for a woman who does not help another woman!

The pledge

This one was a thriller. It was an intense moment of taking a pledge with thousands of women surrounding and I was feeling so happy to be a part of it.
Jacqueline Copeland-Carson, Chief Operating Officer, AnitaB.org told us to take a pledge to fulfil Anita Borg's dream of achieving 50-50 ratio of men and women in the tech workforce by 2020.
I don't remember it word by word but the words that I noted in mind were:

to work every day in every way in achieving Anita's dream!

So it is like, be passionate, work everyday, clear your hurdles and give your 100% always!

Everyone knows algorithm analysis!

wiz — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 06:25:12 +0000

Problem, Problem and Problem!

Though it is going to be all about algorithms yet it starts with PROBLEMS.
Yeah! we have problems just like in mathematics, physics and at various stages of life!
And what we do? We try to solve them. In general, any normal person like you follows this approach:

Understand, what is the problem in actual (Why do I feel like fish? What is the integration of 1/sinx?)
Then you get some reasons and hurdles. If they are vague you keep on trying finding them, until you get some clear reasons and causes. (I don't know what is integration!, I don't like integration, I don't know the formulas)
Then you try to remove them by your superhuman strategies. (Let's google the formula!)
Then you apply these strategies and in return get an outcome. (I am getting wrong answer :( )
The outcome could be successful based on how successfully you performed the above 3 crucial steps. If not you are back to step 1.(Oh shit! it was a minus sign!)

In all these steps you are trying to build a SOLUTION. A solution to solve a problem. Simple no!

In computer science, while solving computer problems you call this term ALGORITHM. Yeah, it's just like calling a brinjal: an aubergine!!
So algorithms (or solutions) for a computer science problem.

What are these computer science problems?

sorting 1 billion data of people by their first name
joining two pieces of text
how many zeroes are in 1000000000000000000?
Which is less costly lucknow->Noida->Kashmir or Lucknow->Haryana->Kashmir?.....and so on..

Anatomy of problem solving

Clearly, there are many ways of solving a problem. But we don't want our computer program to run for years and years and that is why we want an algorithm (aka solution) that will run in minimum possible time.
Okay, so how do I know which solution is better than other?
Simple! just calculate the clock time they are taking by running them !
But we have execution times specific to a particular machine( i5 or i3)
Then, just count which has the larger number of statements. More statements more time!!
No, number of statements depends on the programming language and programmer's style

...................
Then what?
express the running time as a function of input size
Whaaaaaaaaaaaat???

Actually, we are interested in knowing that what happens once we increase the input size. The solution works for 100 elements, 1000 elements but what for 1 trillion? Is the execution time the same?
The input size is the number of elements in the input and depending on the problem it could be the size of an array, a polynomial degree, number of elements in a matrix, number of bits in a binary representation or the number of vertices and edges in a graph.

We are checking the effectiveness based on how the change in input size will affect the running time of the algorithm.
Faster algorithms with large input size are something we are looking for!!

And we are glueing these two things with functions.
Algorithm A runnning time f(n): 2n+n-9
Algorthm B running time f(n): 7logn+2n
Algorithm C running time f(n): 3n+6+n^2

Now how we can compare 2n+n-9 with 7logn+2n?
rate of growth

Comparing algorithms: Rate of growth

Suppose you are planning to buy a bicycle and house this Christmas. When your friend asks what are you buying, you will say house because the cost of the house is more than the bicycle.

total cost = house + bicycle
total cost = house(~approximately)

Okay.. let's take a serious case. Mathematically we know:

f(n) = n^2+2n+6 ~ n^2(approximately)
f(n) = 4n+2^n ~ 2^n(approximately)

The other terms 2n, 6, 4n do not affect the f(n) much as n^2 or 2^n when the value of n gets really really high.
Not affecting in the sense that for the larger values of n, n^2 will become so bigger than 2n and 6 that the change in their values will not have a large impact as n^2. So approximately we can say that f(n) is equivalent to n^2 for the larger values of n.

f(n) ~ n^2 , n is very large

Rate of growth

The rate at which the running time increases as a function of input is called the rate of growth.
If n^4, 2n^2, 100n are the constituent terms of function, then it approximates to n^4 since n^4 is the highest rate of growth.

n^4+2n^2+100n ~ n^4

Why are we interested in largeness?

In practice, you will hardly get any data of 50 or 100 elements. Think about Gmail users, Amazon or Netflix subscribers, youtube and the high-performance computing stuff like simulations and weather forecasting, colleges, offices and so on...
And we need efficient algorithms which are able to process such large input size data

In the next part, I will take this discussion towards Asymptotic Analysis, that we usually see(Big Oh stuff)

Automatically opening a react native mobile app

wiz — Sun, 04 Nov 2018 08:57:49 +0000

I have no experience in mobile app development and want to develop a react native mobile app that would automatically pop up whenever a link is clicked similar to a browser. I have found this StackOverflow answer for Android App.

How can I implement this in react native ?

My First Internship

wiz — Tue, 11 Sep 2018 06:30:55 +0000

Interning at Hasura brought me to a brand new exposure to the world which I did not know about. I get to know about the work ethics, teamwork, communication, app development and a lot more!

How I got that?

I did a course on "Introduction To Modern Application Development" which included an internship from Hasura for those candidates who score among top 5%. The course was one of a kind and till now never seen a course including all sort of concepts and technologies bundled in one pack! It was through this course that I really got to know concepts like API,reverse proxy, bash!

The internship

The internship was of 2 months duration during which we have to build web/mobile applications on a given problem statement and deploy it using amazing Hasura's Kubernetes cluster. And yes, forgot to mention, we need to do this in teams.Read morehere

Little bit about Hasura

At first glance, Hasura is a PaaS with BaaS components. It’s built with CoreOS, Docker & Kubernetes so it can run anywhere. In simple terms, the deployment with Hasura is a matter of two or three commands. That's it!
If you are a frontend dev and don't wanna hassle of creating server files and configs then Hasura is your friend.
Even for backend it provides built-in data and auth API's¹

Work Alottment

I wanted to work on nodejs but could not get since the fellow interns have taken that already. It was then I decided to take on the challenge to learn reactjs.

Task 1 in the inbox!

Then finally I got my first task:

Create a twitter account to use as reference and use Material-UI to create a new ReactJS app with only the following pages:
1. Main timeline
2. Search results

See here what I made.

Difficulties in Task 1: Dec 4-Dec 25

I had my exams but I did manage to learn about reactjs through codeacademy very slowly.

Learning Phase for Task1: Dec 25-Jan 15

After exams got over I seriously got into Reactjs and completed the codeacademy course and made few small apps like todo and name search bar to get comfortable.
Then I delved into building the twitter account pages. It was not so easy still for me because I need to use a UI library. This library then was very new and there were no helpful materials and I took to reading documentation which proved really helpful. Apart from that material-ui docs are easy to follow, the reason it was tough for me then because of jss, grids and quite new ways of using css with react.

Apart from all of these hardships, I managed to implement material-ui in my twitter pages. The feeling of completion was amazing!

But I missed the deadline to submit the task. Not only I there was many interns having the same issue since we all had different exam schedules and were lagging, therefore. So, the deadlines were extended on taking this into account!

Task 2

Now comes some other task :).I got to deploy the task 1 on Hasura cluster. Again, the learning phase started and the docs of Hasura and the support of slack helped me to go through that.

The days after completing the tasks!

I was really happy to have my task completed and waiting eagerly for peer reviewing in which an intern working on some technology will be reviewed by the student not working on the same one. I got react-native to review.

Apart from these a lot of things were happening in the slack. I did not get much time to engage in but then I was free so I started looking for smaller queries and try helping others with the implementation. Even if I could not solve I surely try to go through and follow the conversation and learn about the jargons and concepts since everything was new at that time!

Final Team Task: Team 16

As part of this group task, we were expected to deploy a custom service in Hasura that integrates with the Watson Conversation API and implement the use-cases/features as described in the doc.

For this task, we were grouped into a team of four and had to work collaboratively to achieve the above task! We had one mentor too from Hasura for guidance and we need to update logs daily as a part of the internship.

Our team decided to build a music bot!
This final task had three subtasks!!

Final SubTask 1: Preparing Plan Of Action Doc

This doc was going to enlist our plan of work for the coming weeks including the details of the usage of our Watson api, references, wireframes and all metadata stuff. I prepared some wireframes too.
We submitted the plan of action doc before the deadline! And our mentor reviewed and provided valuable suggestions.
From now we were divided into two sub-teams:
1.Mobile App team ( ReactNative + Nodejs )
2.Web App team ( Reactjs + Python-Flask )

Final Subtask 2: Building a skeletal integration with API

I have to build a chatbot UI and integrate it with the backend
So from here, I have clearly understood that the logic part was with the backend guy and I need to get really creative.
Apart from that, it was not only aesthetics as I thought. After some time the code started getting complex since that was my first time building any big project like this one with several files and modules. Managing React states started getting cumbersome.
I have to constantly map the components and state flow on a paper to understand the code but it was fun! (I did not know about redux then!)

There were a lot of wow moments when my code worked and when I fixed my own created bugs:P

The components I built:
1)Play/Pause
2)Charts Display
3)Overall Container
4)Video Display
5)Download Component

The task then reviewed by the mentor. He loved it! And pass it to publish to Hasura Hub.

Hasura also posted it on Twitter

Final Subtask 3: Extending the functionality

For this one, we added the downloading feature and I fixed some bugs and broken UI stuff and added changing background effect!
Finally, we completed before deadlines this time too with documentation.
I managed the documentation part and Hasura deployments and just loved doing it. After a while whenever any intern faced any sort of problem with deployment I was able to handle that very confidently.

After completing my task I was free and started helping other teams with their frontend work. I collaborated with two teams more and helped them to finish their task on time.

Overall Wrap up!!

I always used to think how the projects were built and how just all industrial stuff happens! It was through this internship I get to know all and actually pushed myself to go to the extreme. People at Hasura were... I say, cool and extremely talented devs and I just got to learn a lot from them.
I learnt technical writing, app development and how the various parts of it are integrated, collaboration, git, posting and answering queries on StackOverflow and in the forums.

❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

Now the things at Hasura has changed a lot! I will be posting an update on migrations from the former version on which I worked. ↩

Hi, I'm wiz_ar

wiz — Sat, 08 Jul 2017 07:26:53 +0000

I am doing internship at Hasura
I am currently learning more about application development.