About me and my interesting project

About Me
Hello, how are your English skills? If you answered “good”, you are in a good position. I am Jyri, 21-year old student. I am studying information processing science and programming is my interest. I have been interested in computers for as long as I can remember. Nowadays my favorite programming language is Java, but I also like Python and C#. I have been teaching programming for high school and elementary school students for half a year now. It is interesting work and it doesn’t take too much time from studies. When you teach about programming skills you can see a lot about it that you don’t think usually. For example, if someone is making a project that you have never considered of implementing you have to make the overall structure clear to yourself and be able to help with it. Programming isn’t extremely sporty hobby, so it’s good that I also like tennis. Our English course started a few weeks ago and we got task to make a blog. I have watched videos and read in English, so my reading and listening is proper at least, but on writing and speaking I haven’t got so much practice on my own. On course we practice of speaking in English and blogging is a gain for writing.

An interesting project
It is hard to choose one project to tell about, because I have done plenty interesting projects in different areas. My most recent project is a social media platform. On our English course we got a team project task to make an app. The app should be including “Outdoor Oulu active”. Now you are maybe thinking about how social media platform is linked with that. Many of my readers have probably used Jodel, because it has been quite popular among university students. In my group we decided to make an app called Chat & Sport. That name tells much about it. It is a Jodel-like forum for talking only outdoor sports. I am the programmer of the group, so I know its technical side.
I had thought before that it would be interesting to make some social media app and when we got our groups, I directly started to make it on that day. I think other groups haven’t even started programming it and I already have used over 40 hours with it. Now we got the protype ready and I already have learned quite a lot. It had to be real-time for posting, liking and commenting so we needed a good database for it. I decided to use Google’s Firebase for it. Firebase contains different cloud services and Cloud Firestore is perfect for our project. Cloud Firestore is NoSQL database like MongoDB. One good side for this kind of project is that it is free to use if your daily reads are below 30k and writes under 20k. I haven’t used Firebase a lot earlier, so it was interesting to get to know about it and design the data structure. It works so well that our app is more real-time than its inspiration Jodel. If you want to see updates in Jodel from database in your feed you must update the feed, but in our app it updates automatically. When you are programming you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel and I found a good open source library called FirebaseUI-Android that has components for implementing the feed.
The app prototype has the ability of posting and commenting. Next, I will be implementing liking and filtering for the app. For implementing likes data structure need to be changed. Filtering is for letting the user choose what categories they want to see. We have decided what categories the app has and maybe soon we will be also adding categories, because now only six sport categories are supported. We have followed material design and the app isn’t bad looking, but it needs more graphical design work to be truly pleasant to use. I think the coming programming for our app will be as interesting as it has been.


(Picture from prototype. Coordinator name comes from layout name that is used for the current view. It will be changed later.)

My goal for the English course 
I am interested to get more practice for my English speaking and writing so my goal is to get better at them. It will be interesting to see how the app, writing and speaking will be after the course. I think I will continue developing the app after the course and of course getting better on writing and speaking in English. What are your goals for the English course or overall?

Comments

Anonymous said…
Your writing has a nice and compact information about the Firebase. Your project and Firebase seems interesting! I agree with you that in software development one shouldn't reinvent the wheel, but on the other hand one should also be careful with the FLOSS/FOSS licensing.
JBlogger said…
If you are interested in firebase you should also try it! Licensing is a good point, and everyone should think about it. Firebase-UI-Android’s license is Apache License 2.0 so it’s not a problem.

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