Event – Page 6 – cuteprogramming

Dream – Build – Publish: My Experience in Microsoft Hackathon (2012 – 2014)

November 23, 2014December 1, 2014 by Chun Lin, posted in CSS, Event, Experience, HTML5, JavaScript, Product, Windows 8

I already forgot how I got to know about Microsoft hackathon back in 2012, few months after I entered my first job.

Dream Build Launch, Wowzapp~

The first hackathon that I took part in is Dream Build Launch. I worked together with my C# guru, Desmond, to build our first Windows 8 app (which was called Metro App back then). We successfully published the app to Windows Store after two rounds of Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE) consultation sessions. We named our first Windows 8 app “EsplanadeGo!”, which has 51 downloads today.

HTML5 for Metro Apps talk given by Alex Goh. Photo Credits: Spiffy — HTML5 for Metro Apps talk given by Alex Goh during Dream Build Launch event. Photo Credits: Spiffy

In December 2012, I participated in another Microsoft hackathon, Wowzapp. That was the first time I won the first prize in Microsoft competition after I graduated from university. The app that I built was called Entertainment Connect, also a Windows 8 app. User can use it to connect to his/her Dropbox account to retrieve media files and then play them in the app.

Near the end of the Wowzapp hackathon, one of the judges from Microsoft Singapore, Eugene, suggested me to build another app which connected to SkyDrive (which was later renamed to OneDrive) because he would love to use such an app and SkyDrive API was still quite new back then.

Because of Eugene’s idea of the app, I challenged myself again in the hackathon organized by Microsoft Singapore in 2014, //publish/. I decided to make Eugene’s dream come true.

//publish/

The special thing about //publish/ was that participants were allowed to bring their own existing Windows 8/8.1 projects. The focus of the event was more about publishing app to Windows Store. Hence, I took the opportunity to complete my second personal Windows 8 app, Entertainment Connect.

//publish/ hackathon was actually a 2D1N event happening worldwide. Personally, I thought the one in Singapore was the most special one because Inori Aizawa was invited as special guest to the event as well! Participants got the chance to take photo with her and won cute prizes. Also, we had the chance to try out Xbox One, the device that people were willing to queue up at Funan DigitaLife Mall for a few hours just to buy one.

Inori Aizawa and Xbox One! Photo Credits: Microsoft Singapore — Where else can you see Inori Aizawa playing Xbox One? Photo Credits: Microsoft Singapore

//publish/ organized by Microsoft in Singapore. Photo Credits: Microsoft Singapore

The event took place at The Co., a very comfortable place just next to my office. So, I got to bring laptop external keyboard and mouse, which helped to improve my coding speed.

There were tech talks given in the first morning. One of them was about Push Notification with Microsoft Azure. This talk in fact helped me a lot in my work when our company decided to do a push notification to Android and iOS phone.

Tech talk about Cortana delivered by Chun Siong. Photo Credits: Microsoft Singapore

Meet People

One of the great things that I love about Microsoft hackathon is that I always can meet imba people here. By just having a chat with them, I get to learn more technologies out there, such as Arduino, Azure Media Services, iOS development, and so on.

Because of this event, I also had the opportunities to make friend with Microsoft Singapore engineers who help me a lot in my work.

Entertainment Connect

Entertainment Connect is my submission for //publish/ in 2014.

What’s so special about Entertainment Connect? Isn’t it just a media player that can play videos and songs? What else?

Firstly, yes, it is a media player. However, it is not a normal media player which can only play the local media files. It connects to your OneDrive account and retrieves available media files from there.

Secondly, I make it so that when you switch from one media file to another, the previous media file is paused and is hidden in the background. So, you can, let’s say, click on one video, play it halfway, then click on another song, then jump back to the same video again and continue from where you stop earlier. So this is actually similar to the “Parallel Video Downloading” feature that I introduced back then in YouTube Re-Player (Desktop) in 2009. The only difference is that now it does not limit the number of videos to be just 5.

Parallel Media Downloading from OneDrive to Entertainment Connect

Thirdly, it supports playing audio in the background. This means that even though the app is running in the background, users can still continue listening to the music and at the same time they can also control the media player.

Finally, it can loop songs and videos. Yup, re-playing is always the must-have feature in the media player programs that I build. =)

Wait, It Was 6 Months Ago!

Some of the readers by now should have realized that //publish/ actually happened 6 months ago. Why do I only blog about it now? Well, the answer is that I choose to blog about it after I successfully publish Entertainment Connect to Windows Store. So, why does it take so long for me to publish an app? This is because I have little time to work on it after the event.

I have learnt the key to finishing a personal project is to work on the project every day. However, I have a full-time work which requires me to OT always. Sleeping has thus become my top priority after work. However, I still try to at least work on the project by writing a few lines of code or just staring at Visual Studio for a few minutes. So, after 6 months of doing so, I am finally able to publish Entertainment Connect.

There is a saying, “Only do side projects you are absolutely crazy about.” Hence, I also installed Entertainment Connect on my laptop so I got to use it daily. The reason of doing so is to force me to remember about the project and to easily find out bugs in the app.

Today, I am happy that I successfully realize the dream of Eugene about a Windows 8 app that he can use to connect to play the media files stored in his OneDrive. In fact, I am very happy to have taken up this challenge and complete the app by myself even though the entire process is tiring.

Prize

I’d also like to take this chance to thank Microsoft Singapore team for giving me a special prize for Entertainment Connect during //publish/. It was a brand new Nokia Lumia 1520. Coincidentally, my Android phone stopped functioning few days before the event. So, I managed to get a new modern smart phone for free.

I should blog about the phone next time to show how good/bad Nokia Lumia 1520 is. =P

Downloads

Entertainment Connect is now available at Windows Store. You can visit the page http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/entertainment-connect/41d91a6b-6b56-4ae8-94b9-9b5f1053ca92 to download it now. It is free. =)

For developers who are interested to read the codes of app written in WinJS, please checkout the source code of Entertainment Connect on GitHub: https://github.com/goh-chunlin/EntertainmentConnect.

Entertainment Connect is now on GitHub! — Entertainment Connect is now on GitHub: https://github.com/goh-chunlin/EntertainmentConnect!

AWSome Day – Learning AWS from Experts and IAM

July 20, 2014July 29, 2014 by Chun Lin, posted in Amazon Web Services, Event, Experience

AWS + IAM

It’s fortunate to work in a company which encourages employees to attend courses, workshops, and training to expand their skill set. Last month, when I told my boss about AWSome Day, a training event hold by AWS expert technical instructors, my boss immediately gave me one day leave (without deducting my annual leave) to attend the event. In addition, I’m glad to have awesome teammates who helped me to handle my work on that day so that I could concentrate during the event. Thus, I would like to write a series of blog posts to share about what I’ve learnt in AWSome Day.

Amazon AWSome Day

This is the second time the AWSome Day was organized in Singapore. Based on last year AWS Summit attendees, a lot of them were looking for more professional training from AWS, and thus AWSome Day once again came to Singapore. This year, the event is at Raffles City Convention Centre, which is just a 5-minute walk from my office. Oh my tian, that is so convenient!

AWSome Day, Awesome Place - Raffles City Convention Centre — AWSome Day, Awesome Place – Raffles City Convention Centre

The registration started at 8am. After that, Richard Harshman, the Head of AWS ASEAN, gave an opening keynote. He shared with us how AWS had removed barrier of entry to start a business online and to increase innovation. My friend who worked in MNC once told me that he was given access to powerful servers to do crazy stuff. I am not as lucky as him. I am working in a startup which does not have sufficient financial capability for that. Hence, I agreed with Richard that AWS (and other cloud computing services as well) does reduce the cost of innovation and experimentation.

Richard also shared with us a story how with the help of AWS, some startup in Malaysia managed to get a few million of visits monthly without an in-house system admin. Yup, our company also does not have a sysadmin. Normally, the work of sysadmin is done by the developers. Hence, we are always looking for a way to reduce the time used on sysadmin tasks so that developers have more time to focus on improving the applications to serve our customers better. So, cloud computing infrastructure with board and deep services to support online workload helps high volume and low margin businesses like ours.

Currently, our company is using both AWS and Microsoft Azure. So, when Richard shared a graph how both AWS and Microsoft are now leaders in cloud computing service, I was glad that we made a right choice to use services from both of them.

After the opening keynote, we had a short coffee break and then we began the 6-hour journey of AWS training which was done by Denny Daniel, Technical Trainer at AWS. Since the training covers many interesting topics, I will not blog all of them here because most of the readers will just tl;dr. I will only write what I learnt and I found useful in my career. So, if you are interested in the event, why not join the future training offered by AWS Singapore? =)

Episode 01: Who am I? I am, I am… I am Identity and Access Management (IAM)!

One of the main concerns about hosting our applications on clouds is security. One of the security tools provided by AWS is called Identity and Access Management, or IAM. It enables the system admin to manage users and their access rights in AWS. Hence, in AWS, each user accessing AWS will have their own security credentials and individual permissions to each AWS service and resource.

After users have been created, we will be given a one-time opportunity to download and keep the user security credentials (Access Key ID and Secret Access Key). Since the keys are displayed only for one time, once the secret key is lost, we must delete the access key and then create a new key.

IAM is secured by default. It means that, by default, IAM users do not have permission to create or modify Amazon EC2 resources. Hence, an IAM policy, which is just a JSON document specifying the rules, is needed.

Besides creating users, we are able to create groups. Thus, instead of assigning each similar user a same set of access control policies, we can also assign the users to a group and then bind the access control policies to the group. This undoubtedly eases the user management. In addition, AWS even allows us to customize the permissions based on a given template!

There are many, many permission templates available when creating a user group.

Another thing that I find interesting is how IAM works with tags.

In order to manage Amazon EC2 resources effectively, we can now tag the resources ourselves with a combination of a key and a value. For example, we can tag our instances in EC2 by owner. So, we can have one instance tagged with “Environment=Production” and another instance tagged with “Environment=Test”. After that, we then can grant IAM user permission to the instances by using the tag with condition key ec2:ResourceTag/Environment.

Finally, in the event, Denny also shared with us a YouTube video about the best practices of using IAM. I am not sure if I got the one he was referring to. Anyway, the following video is what I found on YouTube.

The video is a bit long. So for those who say tl;dw, I summarize the 10 tips below.

Create individual users. Do not just use root credential. Do not have one user account where everybody in the team uses to do everything;
Manage permissions with groups so that only one change needed to update permissions for multiple users. Even now you only have one user in the team, it’s encourage to create a group for that user because at some point there will be new users who are going to need the same permissions;
Grant leas privilege. Only grant the permissions that are required by the users to do their jobs. Less chance of people making mistakes. Avoid assigning asterisk (*) policy for permissions which means full access unless the account is for admin;
Use a policy to force users having a strong password;
Password Policy
Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for privileged users;
Enable MFA.
Use IAM roles for Amazon EC2 instances;
Use IAM roles to share access without the need to share security credentials;
Rotate security credentials regularly. Access keys need to be rotated. Make sure the old access keys have been deleted after the rotation;
Restrict privileged access further with conditions. There are 2 types of conditions. One is AWS common condition, such as date, time, MFA, secure transport (allow traffic coming over SSL only), source of IP, etc. Another one is service-specified condition. Some services provide hundreds of conditions that we can control;
Reduce or remove the use of root account.

"What? You are always using root credential?" The best practice of all: Don't use root access. — “What? You are always using root credential?” The best practice of all: Don’t use root access. (Image Credit: Is the Order a Rabbit?)

Next Episode

There are many topics about AWS covered during the event. IAM is just a small part of it. However, with just IAM alone, I already feel that there are too many areas in IAM waiting for me to discover. Hence, I will continue to write more about what I’ve learned in the future blog posts.

Also, due to the fact that I am new to AWS, if you spot anything wrong in my posts, feel free to correct me in the comment section below. =)

March and April Self-Learning: Path to be the Master

May 1, 2014May 3, 2014 by Chun Lin, posted in Event

Yesterday, the two-month Tech Elite competition officially ended. This time, it took place in APAC. Microsoft technology lovers from Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, and other 5 countries were able to gather in one place known as Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA). In MVA, there are many essential learning resources on a lot of cool topics, such as Microsoft Azure, Windows Server, mobile app development, and C# programming, available.

We can take the courses that we like in MVA and then earn the points by attending the online lectures and finishing the quizzes. So, within these two months, points earned in the officially recommended courses will be used to decide the winner of the Tech Elite competition. The first prize is a Nokia Lumia 1520. Too bad. My ranking on MVA is not even close to the first place. =P

How I feel when I am doing self-learning without proper guidance from the experts (Image Credit: 9gag.com)

Learning from the Pros

Although I did not manage to get the phone, I am still quite happy with what I’ve learned in the past 60 days.

I took only one course, “Windows Azure for IT Pros Jump Start”. It is one of the long courses which consist of more than 10 chapters in Tech Elite.

Normally, I spent around one and a half hours after my work to attend the lecture on MVA. I will first read through the lecture slides before I proceed to watch the lecture video recording. It normally took me around 1 hour to finish the materials and then another 15 minutes on the quiz of each chapter.

The sessions in the course are prepared by David Tesar, Microsoft Lead Azure Technical Evangelist, and David Aiken, Azure Group Technical Manager. They made the sessions to be fun and interesting. I would even laugh in front of my computer when I was watching the recording of their lectures. So, it is quite an enjoyable learning process.

You can enjoy the fun show presented by David and David on MVA — You can enjoy the fun shows presented by David and David on MVA

I have left the school for two years. However, it does not mean that learning should get left behind. When I talk to my friends working in different industries, I am always shocked by the fact that how little I know. In work, I am also constantly challenged again and again with new requirements, new technologies, and new ideas. Hence, frequent exposure to a broad range of topics and exploring stuff which matters in my career as a software engineer are necessary.

Self-learning, unfortunately, has a limitation. I am working in a startup. Time and energy are the two most important things for me. Hence, with the limited time, self-learning without a guidance cannot bring me too far. MVA has thus become an ideal place for me to get more knowledge by directly learning from the tech masters.

Join the Tech Elite - APAC — Join the Tech Elite – APAC

Schedule

Acquiring new knowledge is a never-ending process, even after I graduated from NUS. Hence, self-learning is a way for me to be open to new opportunities and to keep pushing myself forward.

However, since I left the university and started my work in startup, finding time to do self-learning is a challenge. I once tried to wake up around 6am in the morning to attend the online lecture before going to work. Unfortunately, my body did not like this. Every day, getting out of my bed is still my biggest challenge. Hence, eventually, I decided to just do the learning after work for one to two hours.

Studying after work is not easy as well. It is tiring. Luckily, Davids did a very good job in MVA by making the course to be interesting. Even though the content is interesting, studying for more than 2 hours after a long day at work is inefficient because I probably won’t learn much in long-hour studying. So, 1 or 2 hours of self-learning is just nice.

Tech Elite in APAC and OneSword

My character used in MVA together with OneSword

It is a great experience to learn in Microsoft Virtual Academy because I get to learn more Microsoft technologies in an organized way. By the way, for those who wonder why I keep learning MS stuff, it is because my company is using .NET technology a lot. So finding out more about the tools that I am using in my daily life is a natural thing to do in my self-learning.

You should have noticed that the homepage of Tech Elite has this ninja theme. People always like to use “ninja” to refer to good programmer. Even in the previous Microsoft hackathon, I have been seeing the word “ninja” around. There was even a person in ninja costume walking around during the Microsoft hackathon. I don’t know why they do that and why there are so many people like to call themselves ninja. So, in the Tech Elite, I have designed my avatar to not have the ninja design. I also added a sword, aka OneSword, to the character. Ya, why not?

Yup, so my self-learning is not just about coding, setting up servers, but also about cute stuff like drawing as well. =)

MongoDB User Group First Meetup: Learning MongoDB with Seniors

February 16, 2014February 16, 2014 by Chun Lin, posted in Event, Experience, MongoDB

The first meetup organized by local MongoDB user group was held at Hackerspace Singapore on last Tuesday. During the meetup, Matias Cascallares, consulting engineer from MongoDB, shared with us the importance of schema design in a “schemaless” MongoDB, the use cases of different schema design approach, and ended his talk with the new features that will be released in MongoDB 2.6.

Documents and Collections

MongoDB is an open-source document oriented database, an example of the NoSQL database, which is non-relational and horizontally scalable. Many of the databases currently in use are based on relational database model where we have tables and each table has columns and keys defined in database schema.

In my job, I deal with relational database. Sometimes there is a need to store two types of records in the same table. Even though they share some fields with one another, each of them also has its own unique elements. So, I simply combine all the fields and defined them as the columns in the table, leaving unused fields empty or null.

Not all records have discount info in the table

MongoDB stores the data in documents. Documents are stored on disk in BSON, a binary representation of JSON objects. A grouping of documents is called a collection, which is equivalent of a table in relational database model. So documents in MongoDB are equivalent of rows in a table. Because of “schemaless”, collections do not enforce document structure. Documents within a collection can have different fields. Thus, it’s allowed to write the two records shown in the image above into two documents as follows.

{
    ID: 1,
    ItemCode: "T934",
    CreateUser: "User01",
    CreateDate: "2014-01-01"
}
{
    ID: 2,
    ItemCode: "T987",
    DiscountID: 4,
    DiscountAmount: 0.32,
    CreateUser: "User02",
    CreateDate: "2014-02-01"
}

Schema in "schemaless" MongoDB? — Schema design in “schemaless” MongoDB?

Different Approach of Schema Design in MongoDB

I use relational database in my work. I realize that when the tables are growing bigger and bigger, it’s getting harder and harder to adjust the schema. I always hope to have the columns to be dynamic. Hence, the concept of schemaless database in MongoDB interests me a lot.

In relational database, we can use stuff like joins to provide results to a query. However, in MongoDB, joins are not supported. The data is either denormalized or stored together with related data in the same document. In addition, we can also use the _id field of one document in another document as a reference. The application just needs to run a second query to return the referenced data. Hence, it’s like doing a reverse engineering when we are designing schema in MongoDB because now we have to ask “What question will I have”.

Also, due to fact that documents can have different fields, we cannot describe the collection. Instead, we have to look into the codes to find out the schema information of the collections. Even though when we query with a key not existing in any of the document in the collection, it will still not raise an error. It just won’t return anything. So, it is impossible to describe the collection as how we do in relational database.

Shards and Shard Keys

Normally, we use the strongest servers we have to host our databases. We do vertical scaling by adding more CPU, RAM and storage resources to increase capacity. This gets expensive quickly. There is where horizontal scaling can come into play. Horizontal scaling, aka sharding, does a horizontal partition in a database. Instead of just increase the capacity of the one server, we add more servers. The data is then distributed to multiple database servers, aka shards.

MongoDB is built with horizontal scaling in mind. Sharding is implemented in MongoDB with the help of sharded cluster which consits of three components: shards, config server, and router. Router is in charge of routing the reads and writes from applications to the shards by refering to the metadata stored in the config server.

To shard a collection, shard key is needed to divide a collection’s data across the cluster’s shards. During the talk, Matias analyzed three different approaches of schema design for a social network application which has to support a great amount of read and write operations. By just changing the shard key used in the shard and the schema, we manage to get 3 different solutions. One of them is good at writing performance. One is good at reading performance with lots of random IO. Final one is good at reading performance with no random IO but with more work in write. For more details about these three schema design approaches, please read the blog post “Schema Design for Social Inboxes in MongoDB”.

Data Expiration

Data expiration is mentioned in the second half of the talk about schema design.

Data expiration is useful and important because some data stored in database will not be used anymore. However, data won’t expire itself.

In MS SQL Server, we create scheduled jobs with stored procedures to erase the data which has been there for more than 2 months, for example.

In Matias’ talk, I came to know about the feature that was introduced back in MongoDB 2.2, the Time To Live (TTL) Collection. By just specifying a value in the expireAfterSeconds index option, the documents in the TTL Collection will automatically removed after specific period of time.

That’s All

Important slide, the summary. Photo Credit: Singapore MongoDB User Group

The talk is very interesting. I agree that schema design in MongoDB is not trivial. As mentioned during the talk, it does require a lot of practices to get really, really good at schema design in MongoDB and know how to balance between the read performance and write performance. Thus, the talk is actually just a starting point for a beginner like me. It’s now up to me to find out more about MongoDB and other database technologies myself. Hopefully one day I’ll be so imba that I have the opportunity to give a talk about MongoDB as well.

For those who were there will now realize that I do not cover everything of the talk in this post. Firstly, I don’t want my post to be too lengthy. Most of the readers will just tl;dr. Secondly, I just started to learn MongoDB last month, so I try not to “act smart” here. Thirdly, it’s to encourage people to join our Singapore MongoDB User Group to find out more (such as the upcoming talks and other activities) instead of just reading my post. =P

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank my friend, Laurence, for inviting me to attend this amazing talk. I’m now already looking forward to the next meetup in April.