Category Archives: Interesting

Having Flat Tires? PomChek Go Where Is Here To Help.

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pomchek locates your location and find the nearest three bikeshops
clicking on the selected bikeshop and it will give you more details
clicking on take me there, gives you the direction to the bikeshop

After days of waiting, my app have gone LIVE on app store. I think I can now officially call myself a ”developer”, maybe an amateur one.

so what is pomchek go where?

pomchek or rather “pancit” means flat tire in Malay. pomchek go where means when you meet with a flat tire situation, where should you go.

why did I build this app?

Besides setting a goal for myself, when I started learning iOS. I also wanted to build something that I use. I love cycling and there are times when I gotten a flat tire on the road and I need to find the nearest bike-shop available, otherwise it would be expensive cab fare for me.

Than you would be thinking, can you not google? Yes, I can certainly google but when I tried it does not return me all the bike-shops listing available in Singapore , plus even there is one bike-shop location return to me, it might not be the nearest. So I decided that I build a simple location app myself that helps me find nearest bike-shops in Singapore and hopefully someone would find this useful too.

how does it work?

it is a very basic location based app, it does not even required a login.

  1. You download the app and you turn it on, it will determine your location. And it will be returning you some of the bike-shops nearest to you. Currently I set it to return bike-shops within 10km, but I’m thinking in the next update I would reduce it to 3~5km.
  2. And if you selected a particular bike-shop from the tableview, it will give you details of the bike-shop. i.e. name, telephone and address
  3. The “take me there” triggers the apple map to give you the route to the nearest bike shop by walking.

That’s it.

why the cat photo?

I plan to actually show the respective bike-shop photo but it takes up too much time, so I decided to a cat photo. In the next update, this picture would be replace by a random instagram photo. I would be using their api to call for the hash-tag #bike, when a user click on a bike-shop, it would return a different photo, hopefully it would make it more interesting.

how do I make money?

The question that any people ask, I actually have a plan to make money for this app. But currently, the back-end is running on parse and I have less than One million api calls so it does not incurred any charges. If and only if it really (fingers cross) crosses “One million api calls” than I would put my plan in place (otherwise it’s free) I would love to hear ideas about making money from this app from fellow entrepreneurs

I need your feedback

finally, I would love you to download the app, not to give me 5 star rating, because I’m not the kind that goes around asking for 5 star rating but I need your feedback to improve. I know feedback are hash, but only having real and solid feedback than I can learn and become a better developer. So Dear friends, pls give me feedback. Thank you so much for your time.

turning my comment back for this, so I can collect feedback and also if you have feature suggestions, I love to hear them too again Thank you.

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Work Experience Or Going After A Degree?

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Our Education Minister Heng Swee Keat shared his view on chasing paper qualifications on a recent news article on Today.

A good academic qualification alone “does not guarantee a good career”, especially in the current volatile and fast-changing economy where mismatch of skills and expectations for job-seekers could occur, Mr Heng told some 300 graduates and their parents in a speech at Temasek Polytechnic’s graduation ceremony.

I personally thinks that the problem does not *entirely lies on the students but also on the hiring companies. I graduated from Temasek Poly with an engineering diploma, after National Service, I worked as a CNC field engineer before pursing a degree from NUS Business School. Continue reading →

a little interaction to solve the motivation problem of online learning

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Unlocking the power of new technologies for self-guided education is one of the 21st century superhighways that need to be paved. Profound changes to how children access vast information is yielding new forms of peer-to-peer and individual-guided learning.

via Sugata Mitra: We Need Schools… Not Factories.

Self-Organized Learning Environment aka ”SOLE” – SOLE is a term coined by Sugata Mitra. SOLEs are created when educators and/or parents encourage kids to work as a community to answer their own vibrant questions by using the internet. In other words, children no longer needs to attend schools. “SOLE” is slightly different from the things that  education startups are doing, where most of the learning takes place online. But as the two ideas starts to converge, I sure we are not too far way from Sugata’s dream.

primarily problem: the lack of motivation

The problem with online learning is retaining motivation. CodeAcademy tries to solve it with gamification, same for CodeSchool. I too lack motivation when I tried online learning. I gave up on many courses after I lack behind several lessons. (i’m sure many of you do experience this, because of your busy schedule) Out of the four courses in took in Coursera (yes, you can say I was greedy) that I chose to enroll in, I only completed “Gamification” and that was because I have friends taking it with me. Taking the lessons with friends in my opinion makes the lessons much more interesting and I can even have physical discussions / meetups which in turn sorts of triggers my motivation when I see and learn how others are doing. As for CodeAcademy, I only managed to finished their HTML and CSS class. (maybe no friends were doing it with me)

a little interaction comes a long way

I think that maybe having a little interaction – like having meetups would be great to solve the problem of online learning. Just last month, Kong started a 30 Days iOS Challenge, 20 students were selected and each of them paid S$50.00. The S$50 are returned when the students completed the course. Although it is a 30 Days Challenge, but there are only 6 offline lessons, the rest are either doing tutorials that are assigned or self-guided learning.

The 6 offline lessons are kind of like “SOLE” where all of use gather to ask questions and learn from one and other. But most importantly, as I watch others progress, it also indirectly motivates me because I would not want to be lagging behind and having friends around learning together was so much fun. Plus I made new friends too. Just this wednesday, 30 Days iOS Challenge had it’s demo day (you can watch the videos here) And Kong had turn 20 students with non-programming background in amateur iOS developers.  So maybe those who are looking to learn coding on your own and are have problems completing CodeAcademy, maybe finding a group of friends to do it together and setting a date for demo day would help propel your motivation.

finally, my pomchek go where?

PomChek Go Where?

Today is my 160 days since I started my 30 Days Challenge of learning iOS and I am very happy to share with you that I just submitted my app to app store. The name is PomChek Go Where? It is a location based app that helps you find the nearest bike shops in Singapore when you are faced with flat tire. The app is still under review and I listed the launch date to be on 20 May 2013 so I’m really looking forward. And I really thank everyone in the iOS Challenge and especially to @athanhcong, @anttyc and @yctay

 

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I’ve found that when faced with a set of seemingly insurmountable challenges, the first step towards making it easier is to break things down into as large a set of small individual tasks as possible.

via Justin Kan.

Indeed small wins are important.

Especially right now when I learning to code. At the initial stage, it seems almost impossible for me to understand the codes / methods taught in the appcoda. But as I break down the codes into smaller parts, the learning process is so much better and I feel much better too, because I’m able to proceed ahead instead of being stuck behind.

Taking this trick, most of what I do now are broken down into smaller parts, even my daily todo list.

Am I Good Enough For Medium?

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Last Wednesday, I woke up to a surprise email from Medium; this Medium I’m now writing on. It was an invitation to join the platform, to be part of the community. Trepidation soon filled the shoes of my initial excitement. Was I good enough to write on Medium?

Am I Good Enough For Medium? — This Happened to Me — Medium.

My first writing on @Medium, why I was worried that I may not be good enough to write on Medium.

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Boston Marathon is one of the races that I aim to go and I have deep respects for the runners who are taking part. I do not have much to say about the tragic incident but I am a Runner, and this incident deeply saddens me. As I watch the news about runners who lost their limps, I could feel for them because this is the most painful thing that could happen to a runner – losing the ability to run.

I caught this post off my twitter feed, and I took down a quote on it.

Don’t glorify the terrorists and their actions by calling this part of a “war on terror.” Wars involve two legitimate sides. There’s only one legitimate side here; those on the other are criminals. They should be found, arrested, and punished. But we need to be vigilant not to weaken the very freedoms and liberties that make this country great, meanwhile, just because we’re scared.

via The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On – Bruce Schneier – The Atlantic.

There is no doubt. We should not be scared but this also triggers the thought that I or rather us (my friends) should be more aware of our surrounding and take notice of national security. Because IMHO, most singaporeans take our national security for granted. #runstrong

My first 1000m Trail Run

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tl:dr I just completed my first 1000m trail run. In case you wonder what is 1000m to an Ironman finisher. This 1000m *is not the distance but the altitude, together with strong wind and the fluctuating cold weather, this is also the toughest trail run that I did after The North Face 50KMin 2010. This run certainly opens up my knowledge about trail running and further propels my love for running. Furthermore, I really learn a lot on this run both in terms of life and running and I have to share it with you. Continue reading →

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Had the opportunity to met up with the founder of Open Source Cafe (OSS), Mr. Tsutomu-San. OSS as people call it is a co-working space in Tokyo, where NOT only tech people hangs out but also artistes and musicians. ~ It’s a place to create

CoderDojo, an open source programming club for kids

via CoderDojo Tokyo – Open Source Programming Club for Kids.

He shared with me his interesting for design and code. He also runs a weekly class call CoderDojo, that teaches young kids to code. I could just feel it through his eyes that he is so passionate about teaching and he inspires me. (Just like Kong, who believes that everyone can code)

So I’m writing out this post to share with everyone about CoderDojo. There is no CoderDojo for Singapore yet, but the closest one we have is littlehackers.com. The site is not up but the facebook group has lots of interesting stuff.

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I first know about Marco from the Build and Analyse podcast that he did on the 5by5 network. He gives interesting views about the mobile web development, especially with his experience on Instapaper and The Magazine. I later realised that he is also the co-creator of Tumblr, but the interesting thing is that why isn’t his blog on Tumblr?. 

I found his answer on Quora.

I’m a developer. I make things. I’ve always written the CMS that powers my site so I can make it behave exactly as I want, and I wanted to keep doing that even after I left Tumblr.

via (12) Marco Arment: Why isn’t Marco.org built on Tumblr? – Quora.

First thought, why build another CMS, when he did such a good job with Tumblr… I was confused.

Now I understand.

Building things is fun, making it work is even more fulfilling. But the most intriguing thing is that you can have it “exactly as you like“. I used to spent hours finding a perfect blogging platform for myself. I could not find, but I could certainly BUILD one that I like. I’m testing out with Jekyll and currently it is hosted on github.

From where I write, Bohol Philippine.

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Beautiful Bohol

This week, I’m on a holiday over at Bohol, Philippines. A beautiful island located 2 hours away from Cebu. It has a beautiful beach front and an awesome place for diving. But it’s also a place full of tourist traps so do lots of research before you head down to Bohol. (the traps are pretty much like the ones in Phuket) Continue reading →