#dimagi

[shobanarayan]

Maternal Deaths

Tackling Indian maternal deaths by smartphone India leads the world in annual maternal deaths. Technology firms are pairing with the government’s village health program to work with rural women. By Shoba Narayan, Contributor / March 23, 2014

A commuter talks on a mobile phone in New Delhi, July 17, 2013. In bustling New Delhi, technology firms are pairing with the government’s village health…

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[krisallenfields]

The Apple Store is not Setup to Handle Pair Programmers

Today I spent my time coding, sending emails to companies, and brushing up on Ruby.

The first thing I did was complete a couple of programming exercises that Dimagi has available for applicants to show off their capabilities.  I've yet to email them to Dimagi though.  I think I'll write up a few rspec tests for each first and then email them out tomorrow.  

I spent the evening with Ran at the Creamery working on Trifecta.  We added combo bonuses! Combo bonuses are awarded whenever you clear 7 or more blocks at once.  For your efforts, you are awarded with bonus time.  This, of course, is a feature for the timed version of Trifecta.  We don't have bonuses for the unlimited version (yet).  We used CAKeyFrameAnimation to have the bonus text grow larger and then shrink away.   The text also changes opacity (brighter and then dims to nothing) while scrolling upwards on the game board.  It looks pretty good but Ran is going to spend a little more time styling it to make it look great.  I'll spend my time coming up with a better algorithm for the bonuses and for scoring in general.  Right now it's too easy to score big on the small level and too hard to do so on the xl level.  And I want to make sure that it's not too easy to stay alive forever with the new timed bonuses.  

We were hoping to submit our app to the app store tonight but that didn't happen.  The difficulty is that we each have our own individual iOS developers accounts but we can only submit the app through one of them.   While we can attribute both parties in the description and perhaps on the splash screen of the game itself, only 1 person can be listed as the seller.  Being that you can search for an app by the seller's name, it's not entirely trivial.  Plus it would be kind of cool to see my name listed under the app's name. I imagine Ran feels the same.  Also only one of us will have access to login and check the app's stats, which if nothing else, would be kind of cool to look at.  The other option we toyed with was setting up a third shared account.  This has two problems.  First, it would cost us $99/year just to maintain a free app.  That's bad, but not completely out of the question.  Second, Apple would still require we list the seller of the app as a 'legal name'.  This can be an individual's name or a company name.  So we still couldn't list it as Ran Tao & Kris Fields or Kris Fields & Ran Tao.  We'd have to choose one of our names or we'd have to start a company just for the purpose of submitting an app.  That's pretty ridiculous so in the end we'll probably resort to flipping a coin.  I pick heads!

[krisallenfields]

10 Days Left in San Francisco

On the first of each month, a thread is posted on Hacker News called "Who is Hiring" and companies from around the world will post the tech jobs they have available.  Being that I'm in the market for a tech job, I spent the afternoon going over each job listing and finding those that seemed the best fit for me.  If it seemed like I might be qualified I'd further research the company to see if their mission appealed to me.  Then I began writing cover letters and emailing each of those companies.  I only emailed about half of the companies on my list before it was time to head off to a Ruby meet up.

The last couple of times I've gone to meetups I've arrived a little bit later and missed out on some of the networking opportunities that occur at the beginning of these events.  Plus I end up eating cold pizza.  I didn't want to make that same mistake (I'm not overly fond of cold pizza) so I made sure to arrive on time.  Unfortunately, at this particular event, there wasn't any time set aside for networking before the presentations began.  With a lot of work still to do before I can submit Kringle to the app store, I only stayed for the first presentation, which was given by Craig Muth on his project, Xiki.  Xiki stands for executable wiki.  It's a shell console where you can run ruby code, execute SQL statements, write notes, browse the local file system, and a lot more.  It was actually pretty cool and easily customizable too.  Supposedly it only takes a few lines of code to set it up to run just about anything.

One of the companies I sent my resume to - Dimagi.com - auto replied with some programming exercises that they recommend an applicant complete to increase their odds of being hired.  I only had a few minutes to scan them before heading to the meetup.  They look similar to some of the problems I worked on as preparation for the App Academy.  Being that Dimagi is a pretty amazing company that I'd love to work for, I'll be setting aside time tomorrow to bang out solutions to each of their problems.