Hello, dear readers! If you remember from my older blog posts, I went through how I was developing an app with a group of other students. In this blog, I’ll try to do some reflecting on the app’s planning process and talk about what kind of experience it has been for me. 

As I mentioned in the other blog post, our application’s main goal is to help people find events near them. The idea might sound simple, but the design process is quite complicated. Trying to make the application user-friendly requires good design in both front-end and back-end of the application’s architecture. Obviously the user-interface must be easy to use, but if the goal is to fetch and display information quickly, the back-end needs to have things such as efficient algorithms and optimized dataflow. 

My role in the planning process was to handle some of the more technical parts, because that’s where my expertise lays. Like in every other application’s planning process, everything seems to be clear before the development stage. However, it’s almost never smooth sailing and instead many problems arise after first iterations of the product. Tho we never got that far, we started facing issues such as how to fetch the events data in real time and how we’re going to handle the application’s scalability once the user count grows. Obviously more traffic in our end means more users fetching the data from the servers. Those are complicated issues that need more expertise than what most of the freshman students have.  

All the problems aside, it was a great learning experience. As I said earlier, we never really got out of the planning stage, but I still got some insight on what kind of things you need to take in account in the planning process, such as how to design API’s and how to implement a database for the application. 

Thank you for reading this “update” blog and I hope you have a wonderful day!  

This blog post is about a book that I read for my English course assignment. Unfortunately I only had time to read the first chapter from the book before the deadlines hit me, but I found the book interesting and will probably try to finish it. The book was called “The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master” and I chose it because I found the topic interesting. Building pragmatic software might seem easy, but often software developers forget who they’re building the software for.

First chapter was called “Pragmatic Philosophy” and it covered seven different topics that all gave some advice on what kind of mindset to have while trying to build more pragmatic software. I honestly found all the tips and lessons useful and profound. Some of them I could associate myself better with but overall I think they were useful to know.

For example, one of the topics went through how good-enough software is important to recognize. This basically means that sometimes users might be satisfied with a product that meets the user requirements but still has some rough edges and fine tuning to be done. As a developer, sometimes it might be hard to recognize when to stop polishing your code and the software. The book gave an example from art painters point of view, that if you keep adding more and more layers to your painting while trying to polish it, the core of the painting will get lost in all the fine tuning and thereby lose its value.

I do agree with the author on the points and lessons the book taught me, but I think some of the lessons are hard to learn without personal experience. Best advice that I learnt from the book was probably the “good-enough software” advice that I explained earlier, since that’s something that can be applied to any software project. Hopefully I’ll learn some more once I’ve finished reading the book.

Hello, dear readers! This week I’m writing about a project that I’m currently developing with a group of other students. The project is a mobile application that’s going to help people find sports events near them. We already have planned all the features the application is going to have, but we still need to figure out how we’re going to handle user security and other important issues like version control.

The project itself is not going to have too many features, since we lack the resources to implement anything fancy, but we’re hoping the deliver a functional app that can prove itself useful to users. As mentioned before, the app’s main feature is to find sports events that are happening near the user. There’s six people in our group, so we are going to have to use some sort of version control to manage the project’s development better. Currently we’re set on using Github, since it seems very efficient way to manage different versions of our application and some of us have also used it before.

For user interface, we’re going to be using React Native framework. It’s very handy, since it allows the application to be launched on both iOS and Android. The quality of the app is not going to be as good as native applications that are made using e.g Swift or Java, but that’s the sacrifice we’re going to have to make in order to make our app more accessible.

Testing of the application is mainly done by our group and hopefully some other students that are willing to test our product. That’s the best we can do with our current available resources, but thankfully it should gather enough information about app’s user experience.

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for next week’s blog post. I’ll keep you updated on the project once we make some further progress.

Welcome to my blog! I’m Petri, a 21-year-old Finnish student and I’m currently studying at University of Oulu. I’m really passionate about software engineering, coding in general and other computer related stuff, which has led me to study information processing science.

At a young age, I was introduced to computers by few of my relatives who work in the field of IT. Ever since then, I’ve been hooked on playing video games. Eventually, I lost a bit of interest in playing the games and got more interested on how to make them. That lead me to start doing research on how computers work, what coding is and how software and especially video games are made. Nowadays, my interest has shifted more towards software, which is why I’m currently learning web development.

My skills in web development are still fairly limited, but I’m currently keen on learning web back end along with coding languages such as python, C# and php. My goal is to eventually become a good programmer (possibly a full stack developer) and land an interesting and meaningful job. As I mentioned earlier, I began coding at a moderately young age. Therefore, I’ve started and completed quite a few programming related projects.

Most memorable programming project for me was a project I did with my friend in 7th grade. Our IT teacher at the time was really passionate about computers as well, and saw that we were interested in learning more than just the mandatory stuff. He bought us an Arduino, a few sensors and some small electric motors to go with it. We built a fairly simple RC-car, that had the ability to change direction autonomously when it detected an object in front of it, similar to how Roombas work. My friend did all the soldering and stuff regarding electronics, while I was in charge of coding that beast. The code itself wasn’t too long, but the whole project was a fun learning experience for both of us.

We were able to complete the project, which felt like a massive accomplishment. Although I’ve also been involved in much more difficult projects, such as coding Android apps with Java, game programming with Unity and C#, web development with React & Javascript and automation with Python, the RC-project was the moment when I knew I wanted to do some sort of programming as a career.

After reading this post, you might’ve spotted some grammar or other spelling errors. Which is why my goal regarding English language is to become more adept writer. As my vocabulary expands and grammar becomes better, these blog posts will hopefully be easier and more enjoyable to read. Currently my blog is focused towards the ongoing English course, but after that the blog posts will be mainly about interesting and useful technical subjects that I learn in my daily struggle of becoming a good programmer.