MkrSqr | blog

Design / Development / Engineering blog for sharing experience gained while building MkrSqr.

[sqr-root]

Brief Introduction for Interns

Hello & welcome to MkrSqr! This blog post is meant to give you a brief introduction on the development aspect of MkrSqr & get you started with it. We currently have the following different fields of work -

User Interface (UI) development

Web back-end (Django)

News Feed Generation (Crawlers)

Mobile Application development (Android only, for now)

The UI development part is handled by Satyajit. The Android Application development is handled by Mrudul Parikh. Ashish (me), Mrudul Tarwatkar & Pravin are in charge of the Django backend & Crawlers. Before going into specifics for any project, I would like to list the various platforms we are using for our work. We'll add you on each of them.

Slack - For most of the team communication

Github - Code version control & issues

Trello - To keep track of work, to-do & other requirements

The main programming language being used is Python (version 2.7). Since the Crawlers & web back-end are based on that, for starters, you should get acquainted with it's basics at least. For installing & an overview on Python, please have a look at the official beginners' guide. Following are some good tutorials -

Learn Street

After Hours Programming

You can use any IDE of your choice, but if you are looking for one, I'll suggest PyScripter &/or Notepad++ if you happen to be on Windows, else, this stackoverflow question should help you.

All of the web back-end code is contained in our mkrsqr_django github repository. Similarly, the code for our web spiders is in the Crawlers repository. All the necessary information for setting up your work environment for the respective projects is listed in the project README at the bottom of the repository home page. The instructions are primarily for Ubuntu, but if you need any help on setting up on a different OS, feel free to message me on Slack. If you require ANY other assistance, be it for any reason (however silly), PLEASE do not hesitate to ask! I am often online (almost everywhere :-p ), even in your regular EST times, so drop a private message & I'll be more than happy to help! Good luck!

[sqr-root]

Discussion (24th May 2014)

Hey everyone, the general discussion points of yesterday's (24th May 2014) hangout.

1) We need to hire an intern for phase II who can work on extension of crawlers. 2) We need to finish the working prototype of the website and Android app in next 20 days (15th June) so that we can test it and forward it to our friends for testing by our expected release date (1st July). 3) If required, Mrudul Parikh will develop the android app independently of the webservices for the initial stage. 4) Satya will provide the htmls by next week (1st week of June) and then Ashish and Mrudul T can work on integrating it. 5) We won't be storing the images on our server (copyright issues) and hence will hotlink the image from the source. 6) The most important point - If anyone has any concerns, please feel free to contact Pravin/Satya. :P

Let me know if I missed out on any point.

Regards, Mrudul

[sqr-root]

The discussion (5th May 2014)

Hi All,

Today in our discussion call, we decided that we will use Github as our version control and for assigning tasks. Also we will be trying different ways to communicate and discuss online and will freeze on what everyone feels comfortable with.

Apart from this, everyone should actively involve themselves in the conversation and try and bring different points and their views on the topic. Commenting on blogs, on hangout will help each other understand better and also bring out different perspective to the discussion.

Lets start from today to actively keep posting different things here. Satya has created an account on Slack as well. Lets try that as well. :)

[sqr-root]

Provide all resources we have got.

Someone post all the prototype links here. I think everyone needs them for their reference. And Wireframes, if any, are necessary. If we can make a Concept Note like thing that will be great.

Because this is a big project so when we start making anything, everything should be taken care of. Many times it happens that we discuss something, come up with a great idea/feature and then forget it.

Now, let say, a third person asks me to explain the project idea to him, I won't be able to explain to him because I'm myself not clear about that.( For ex. the Discussion part). So if we know what exactly the future challenges will be,we would keep that in mind and write the code accordingly.

In short all, I think, we need is something like a documentation. :)

[sqr-root]

Anyone has any leads on this?

Few months back few students from one of the IIT's ( I remember ) made an android application which collects news from top sources in the world and give a 50 words (exact 50 I guess) short news in the app.

Anyone know about this app? I'm not remembering it neither it's on Google. :/

The way these people combine a single news, from different sources, into a news of just 50 words, which is faster to read could be of help to us. I wanna just check that app once to know how it works.

This could be of great help. I'm not remembering it's name and anything about this app. If anyone know anything about this thing do tell. :)