Beautiful Code Design Best Practices Recap

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”
-Martin Fowler et al, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999

This  quote from MartinFowler  captures very well  the main theme  of Dar es Salam GTUG latest event  dubbed  “beautiful code design best practices”. We to were trying to dive deep into  what does it take to write code that not only  a  machine understand and execute but more so fellow humans  so as to ensure the sustainability of the code in terms  of  scalability and maintainability of it.

But before we dived in the best practices, Tony Severine, warmed up audiences with how to use G oogle  map maker to    do mapping.For  most upcoming  meetings we  will take few  minutes  to promote  the idea of mapping  in our effort to  try to put Tanzania on the world map.

Next up  was MbwanaMbura who kicked things off  with  his presentation titled,”Beautiful code”,   talking about best practices for writing  beautiful working code such as  , how to break long methods, proper naming  of methods and  proper documentation  of your code.  And  then finally  he  talked about the question of  programming languages,  and   how  different problems can be tackled  in ways more than one  if  you are knowledgeable in  more than just one programming language.

The  last presentation came  from  Alex Makumuli,  in  a form of  a Google  hangout  from Finland, titled “Better  Software”.  Alex ‘s   presentation  emphasis was on using  test driven  approach to developing software. It was accompanied by live demo sessions in  writing test  before you start to write actual code  for your application and  how to do  refactoring of the existing code.

Many  thanks to our  wonderful  presenters   and  to all of  t hose who showed  up  for this event .

Various resources from this meeting  can be found through  the following  links.

Photos,    http://bit.ly/H3fQT5  ,  ( more photos will be posted soon)

Presentations,   http://dar.gtugs.org/previous-events-resources-2

Highlights from the first G-Tanzania (Google Developer event)

It all started with an email sent in November 2011 from one of the Googlers wanting to meet up with the Dar GTUG leads to start preparing for a potential G event in Tanzania. The GTUG team was excited because this event was on our wish list as we were also lobbying behind the scenes for this event to take place in Tanzania.This was the very first ever Google developer day event in form of a conference dubbed g|Tanzania. Being the first G event in Tanzania this was an opportunity for Google to engage with a community of local developers, business leaders, and entrepreneurs who are passionate about technology.This engagement started a day before in the form of a pre -event hangout session between Googlers , members of Dar es Salaam GTUG and tech enthusiasts in the country at the Innovation space within the Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH) . This was a combination of one on one sessions between attendees and Googlers and a Google Plus Hangout with other Googlers from all over the world about the tech scene in Tanzania.This was a nice way to kick things off and get people even more excited for the official opening of G-tanzania a day after I.e 2^nd and 3^rd of Feb, 2012 at the Mlimani City conference Center.

The conference was split into two days , Day 1 had more hands on sessions for developers to understand Google Platforms such as Google App Engine , Android and Google web toolkit. they were introduced to these tools so that they could develop applications and sites that are locally meaningful in the Tanzanian context. Day 2 was more geared towards businesses and entrepreneurs with a quest to learn how to use advanced Google products such as Google Analytics, Adwords and Adsense to enable and grow their businesses in the web and mobile arena.

Attendees had the chance to explore Google’s open source technologies through a combination of tech talks, breakout sessions and codelabs run by engineers and business teams from across Google offices around the Globe such as Nairobi, Accra and Zurich. The event featured a lineup of high caliber Google speakers who offered key insights in understanding the important role innovation plays in business.Some of the highlights from this event were various efforts that were shown by Google such as trying to make the internet relevant and useful to local people by various Swahili localization and content creation efforts as explained by a Googler from the localization team , Salome Nduku, some of these efforts included localization of Gmail into Swahili , Swahili Wikipedia challenge and Google books partnerships.

The last event was the mapping party that took place at COSTECH on Saturday 4^th Feb, this was another opportunity to put Tanzania on the map , through crowdsourcing of knowledge of various individuals and putting it to good use through mapping of various places in Tanzania.

Overall G-tanzania and all pre and after events was a wonderful platform to bring together Tanzanian tech enthusiasts together ,to network and get to know others in the community hopefully for major collaborations in the future. In Tanzania, there are very few events of this nature and this one from the feedback that has been given out by attendees seems to have had a major impact in how the tech community interacts moving forward from now onwards.

Android Developer Challenge Sub-Saharan Africa 2011 launching in Dar es Salaam.

This event was one of a number of events marking the launching of the Android Developer Challenge Sub-Saharan Africa 2011 in all the 14 countries in Sub Saharan africa taking part in the competition.

Overview of the event

The event to launch Android Developer Challenge – SSA which took place on 30th April 2011 was a great success in many ways. During preparation of the event we focused mainly in publicizing the event to colleges and higher learning institutions around Dar-es-salaam, and we had an initial estimate of getting around 70 attendees.but on the day of the event about 130 people showed up, from both universities and start-up IT companies around.

Nature of the audience

In the group of all attendees the number of those who had previous experience with building apps for Android Platform was fairly small, but most of them were experienced in JAVA. After a brief introduction to the platform which was followed by a “hello world” demo most people realized how feasible it was to write apps for android

Presentations

The event started with a little introductory remarks from the Director General of Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH) Dr Hassan Mshinda .

David Kagoma, Dar es Salaam GTUG co-manager was the next speaker up, introducing Dar GTUG to the audience and then went to give a detailed presentation on the android developer challenge SSA .

The next presentation was done by Joachim Mangilima, another Dar es Salaam GTUG co-manager who introduced the Android platform. He also spoke a little on how to install and configure the SDK in both Windows and Linux.

This was followed by the “Hello World” demo in which he showed how to debug Android apps using the emulator.

Tony Severine, was up next entertaining attendees with the Android trivia game, before Rosarion Arun finished things off with a presentation on Code and Project management.

View of attendees with regard of Launch event and the competition

Most attendees expressed how delighted they were to take part in the launch of the competition including all the information that they received during the event. Nahid Valli a student from Dar es salaam Institute of Technology, DIT wrote an email specifically thanking the organizers of the event for raising the awareness among students about the android platform and software development associated with it For those who participated the event, it has been an absolute eye opener, showing them possibility of exploiting different opportunities that are available in the mobile industry.

Participation in Competition

About 50 people who were in the event registered their names indicating that they will take part in the competition.

Way forward

Taking into account how well the competition has been received we find it imperative that we provide more support to those who are participating in the competition so that on 1st June they can make strong submissions in the competition.

We have planned to hold weekly peer-app-reviews with teams that are participating in the competition. This will enable participants to have a common place they can meet every week to exchange ideas on their apps and help each other in solving some of the challenges that they face. Reviews will start on 7th May and continue up the date of submission of apps to the competition.

Also we are targeting to use these weekly reviews for live testing of apps in real android devices that some of DarGTUG managers have.

We are confident that this initiative will help more teams from Tanzania to take part in the competition and submit even better apps.

Please follow the following link to see pictures from the event, goo.gl/Q1p12

To keep up to date with what is happening with those who are going to take part part in the challenge please register your self on Dar es Salaam GTUG mailing list located at https://groups.google.com/group/dargtug