In my first post, I didn’t know enough to address “What is CS3216?”. In this concluding post, I’ll leave a few words so future students can make an informed decision before they decide to take this module.

STEPS was the finale event for CS3216. This post is a summary of what we did for the event, and what we learnt.

We wanted to do a crowdsourced deadlines aggregator for Assignment 3. It would be organized by modules, with students contributing deadlines for individual modules. By tying it to their school accounts, student’s would be held accountable for what they posted, thereby minimizing fake or spammy posts (unless they were okay with their reputation being ruined).

Give For Free wasn’t always ‘a platform to raise funds for charities’. The original idea, proposed by Patrick, was a platform to exchange free stuff. But why would that work? The motivation for givers was to help them get rid of stuff that was cluttering up their house. Anything old or unwanted would be perfect for the platform. For takers, the motivation is clear. You can get anything you want from the platform for free.

It was Friday, the 28th of October, and I’d just gotten home after a long day. It was the end of a tiring week, and I wanted nothing more than to lie down and have a good rest, but I had a 3216 project meeting scheduled at 11pm. Going by our progress, I was stressed out and worried we wouldn’t be able to meet our objectives. It wasn’t so much the technical aspect (we had most of the backend ready from Assignment 1), but all the real-life problems that we had to settle. At that point, we had two weeks left to STEPS, but were still stuck on multiple fronts.

Give for Free is launching on Wednesday! Like our FB page, share this photo and login via Facebook here to participate in our free MiBand 2 giveaway!

Given the time constraints, we decided it was unwise to assume we would be able to work with Comfort Delgro to mount our devices on the buses, or obtain access to their API to improve the accuracy of our estimates. As such, we’re back to working on Give For Free, with a slight twist. It’s no longer a platform for giving your stuff away free, but a way to raise funds for a charity of your choice.

My team is looking at providing a new and refreshed NUS Bus App, that provides not only location tracking, but also crowdedness estimation. To achieve the second aim, we found a cool package called Reinspect which counts the number of people in an image. So while the others are working on the hardware (Ten), the web server (Patrick) and the UI (Zhuohan), I’m figuring out how to make a function that takes in images and spits out people counts. But before I could even dive into Reinspect, the dependencies alone took me an incredible amount of time to set up. So for the blog post this week, I’ll be documenting how I set up CPU-only Caffe and ApolloCaffe on a Ubuntu 16.04 Digital Ocean Droplet.

Schoolines is a deadline management system for all you lazy students out there. This is a platform that systemically leeches the effort of the hardworking and helpful to help those who can’t be bothered to organize their own deadlines hehe. The system is built around different modules, so when you add a deadline for a certain module, the deadline syncs to everyone else taking that module. You’ll get credited for any deadline you contribute, so you’ll also be earning some street cred along the way! Check it out here!

The latest version of the app is hosted here.

Assignment 3 Updates

So…the test version of our app is hosted here. Right now, it’s just a plain UI, but we hope it progresses beyond this soon. Most of our backend code is already written up, but the frontend and backend code was written separately, so it’s probably going to take some time to integrate. (Update: Hanming just integrated it last night while I was asleep lolol)

It’s 2016. Nowadays, it’s often easier to take notes with insert fav note taking app rather than lugging your notebook and stationery around. For the obstinate people, 53 Inc. has presented a delightful alternative to both our traditional media (actual pen and paper) and our laptops.

Wait for it

giveforfree is far from ready, and we’ve a terribly long list of stuff we plan to complete within the next two weeks. At the same time, we’ve also been informed that UI/UX evaluations are starting this week so we’ll be waiting for the email to arrive lolol.

A lot of work

CS3216 is a lot of work. The first assignment is taking a lot of time, especially since I’m using a new framework I’m not too familiar with. Before we could even get settled, Assignment 2 was announced.

What I think CS3216 is

I haven’t taken the mod, so I can only tell you what I believe it to be. I’ll probably attempt to answer this again at the end of the semester.