Themed Fridays: Musicians

Every last Friday of every month, we have an office activity called "Themed Fridays." If you've followed this blog for a while, you know that Themed Fridays are days when we go to the office dressed as someone other than ourselves. We've had Uniforms, TV/Movie Characters, Halloween, and Christmas. 

We do this because we like to blow off steam every end of the month and just dress up like weirdos and laugh at ourselves. (Besides, it is ultimately cheaper than going to a shrink.) 

Also, we exercise our brains this way -- we get our creative juices flowing and we get to participate in an activity as a team. 

For the first TF of the year 2013, the motif is Musicians. This theme was chosen because a lot of kids in Ingen are actually accomplished musicians: there are singers, band members, and YouTube sensations among us. And all the rest who aren't, love music nevertheless. We wanted to give acknowledgement to that other facet of everyone's personality -- not just the cool, calculating brain who works on codes day in and day out, but the sensitive heart that is capable of producing and appreciating beauty through music.

Kids, feast your eyes on creativity:

Koon as My Chemical Romance's Gerard Way

Ayra as Amy Winehouse

Pat as Jason Mraz

Gik, Gia, Baia, and Jan as KISS

Philip as Marilyn Manson

Kevin as Korean Popstar TaeYang

Bea as Queen Latifah

Ronil as Kean Cipriano of Calla Lily

Mancio as Franco Reyes of Franco

John as Sting

JC as Nelly

June as Ebe Dancel of Sugarfree

Marlon as Shakira

Andy as Billy Joe Armstrong of Greenday

Sonito as Andrei, Andrei as Ely Buendia

and last but certainly not the least...

JA as Ceelo Green

More photos here. Enjoy and ROCK ON!!!

Code Review by Philip Arguelles

Ingenuity: So, what was it you were working on, Phil?

Philip: To give you an overview, the project I'm working on has cell scripts -- a script that will be triggered by an update or an add event of a specific key in the database.

Of course, I was using Python-Django in its development.


Ingenuity: So what issue did you discuss on your code review?

Philip: On the talk, I discussed about how to easily capture and keep track of changes in a specific database table without using Django signals. This was easily done by adding several codes in the built-in "__init__" function of the class.

Another issue discussed was how to efficiently compare the equality of the objects. Since the objects are not native datatypes, I used and overrode the built-in function "__eg__", "__le__", "__ne__", "__gt__", and "__ge__" so that we can use the operators "==", "<=", "!=", ">=", ">", and "<" on objects; no need to iterate on the object fields!


Ingenuity: Wow, that's ingenious! Where did you get that idea?

Philip: Thanks! I had help from http://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html


Ingenuity: There really are lots of wonderful things to discover on the worldwide web, if you know where to look! What other cool stuff did you share on your talk?

Philip: Yes, that's true. There are millions out there.

Another thing that I discussed was how to prevent the code execution from breaking while it is running and how to inform the admin of the errors in the individual cell scripts.

This was solved by sparingly using the "try-except" clause and skipping the cells which has errors in them while simultaneously recording the errors encountered on the database for the admin to see.


Ingenuity: Thanks for your time, Phil. That was a great code review!

Philip: No problem. Thank you too.


*Philip Arguelles has been with the team for more than a year and has been steadily improving on his Python and Django skills. He is also adept at PHP, JavaScript, HTML, MySQL, SQL, and Ajax. Silent and unassuming, he works best under pressure and has earned the trust and approval of both the team and its clients.

Chillaxin' Beach Getaway

Before all this "tail-end of a cold front" weather came about, January was actually sunny. Well, on the week preceding the beach outing, there was a bit of nasty weather and typhoon warnings were ubiquitous but thankfully, as the date rolled around, the sun came out.

The team trooped to Isla Reta in Talicud Island. It's a small island off Samal, about a 45-minute boat ride from Davao City's Sta. Ana Wharf. On the map, it's here:

Everybody enjoyed a beachside barby of yummy noms:

Our favorite, Edgar's Lechon

And had a lot of fun, like kids in a big, tropical sandbox:

Uno Stacko

Beach Frisbee

Beach Volleyball

And poker.

Everybody did their own thing and had fun doing so:

Some were happy to just hang around, enjoy the salty sea breeze, drinking ice cold beer like Scooby here -

 while others got off on burying people/being buried alive -

Others curiously explored the sea floor and found exotic sea creatures -

While some contented themselves with posing like models amongst rocks -

The team enjoyed their dip -

But more than anything, they enjoyed the camaraderie and respite from their respective workloads. It was also a chance to welcome the newcomers to the team at a more relaxed setting where people could let their hair down and just be themselves.

Truly a great outing!

More photos after the jump. :)

Code Review by JA Arce

The Training Department of the team, headed by June, makes sure that the devs' codes are clean, consistent, and optimized by doing constant quality control. One such way to check up on this is through Code Reviews. All devs on the team are required to undergo the Code Review and JA, whose last name begins with 'A', was up first for the year.

On JA's code review, he showed a piece of code which answers a certain issue he encountered while working on his current project - a social networking site for weather conditions with maps, current weather trends, forecasts, and real-time weather report updates. His problem: posting a multipart-form data from server to server. JA's solution: using a third party Python module called POSTER. 

But he was concerned about how safe it was to use. Apart from that, he also wondered if it is the only option that is available, or if it's any good. JA, as well as June, then consulted numerous online forums, and they found that Poster is the solution that could easily be perceived as the best, according to other programmers who have also encountered the same issue and have used this same Python module.

So then JA showed his peers the part of the code Poster was implemented in and true enough, it worked wonders! He was now able to upload multipart-form data (in his case, images) from the Web Server to the API Server with no difficulty.

JA also showed other interesting stuff to share to his peers, such as real-time implementation using NodeJS and BackBone JS implementation.

An A+ code review, as everybody present learned a lot from JA that day.

*John Andrew "JA" Arce is one of Ingenuity's ninja software developers who specializes in Android, iOS apps, Python, Django, PHP, JavaScript, and Yii. With the team for more than a year, he has been a solid and consistent performer, and delivers above and beyond the clients' expectations.

Campus DevCon - UIC

Last December 12, 2012, two of our boys were invited to speak at the Campus Devcon held at the University of Immaculate Conception Main Campus, Davao City.

The event was a brainchild of DevCon Mindanao, aimed to inspire the youth about what successes they could achieve in the field of Information Technology as well as what new trends, innovations, and new applications are in actual use in the IT industry as of the moment.

JA Arce spoke about NodeJS (Realtime WebServer), an application very much like the Facebook chat wherein stuff you do is relayed in real time through the worldwide web.

Mancio Basoc, on the other hand, shared about iOS development, what is it about, what requirements are needed by a developer in order to start with it, and a complete introduction as well as a comprehensive overview about iOs developing.

Ingenuity developers have often been invited to speak at such forums, as DevCon Mindanao has been inviting them to share the knowledge they have since last year.

JA is no stranger to these events - he is always the one on top of the list whenever forum speakers are in need. He relates, "I feel a sense of accomplishment whenever I get invited to these events to speak. Not only do I help out in my own little way, it's also a tremendous feeling to be able to inspire." It was Mancio's first time, though, and he says he was a bit apprehensive and nervous at first but fell right into the role during his presentation.

Indeed, this is but another facet in Ingenuity's drive towards giving back to the community and the academe. We hope that we could help out more, inspire more, and in doing so, grow more to be better individuals. We are not just programmers...we're programmers with a heart.

<3

Merry Christmas Party!

The Mayans were an ancient people who lived in Mexico some thousands of years ago. In modern times, they are famously known for seriously scaring the crap out of everyone by foreseeing that there will be annihilation of all human life on December 22, 2012.

Incidentally, that is precisely the reason why we decided to celebrate our Team Christmas Party on December 21st so that we could, um, party like it's the end of the world. At least, if the apocalypse does come on the 22nd, we would have spent our last few moments inebriated with ice cold alcohol, sated with porky, vein-clogging cholesterol, and partied out until our feet gave out from right under us and our voices hoarse from too much shouting, singing, and laughing.

As it was Christmas, we planned a shindig worth its salt and pulled out all the stops.

The food was heavenly (and fattening!).

Let me tell you, that lechon is the mother of all lechons! The skin keeps crispy even after a few hours and the meat is so tasty. This is from Edgar, our lechon guy. The rest of the menu for this party includes an especially-garlicky molo soup, yummy garlic rice, beef stroganoff pasta, chicken cordon bleu, crabs with aligue sauce, pork barbecue, tenderloin tips in oyster sauce, and for dessert chicken macaroni salad, buko pandan salad, and fresh fruits. Catering was done by Ayang's. 

The booze was overflowing.

       

 

Our mobile bar for the night, Bottoms Up, even presented a 10 minute flair-tending exhibition featuring their bartenders.

Many thanks to Bottoms Up's Jeorge for seeing to it that we had enough drinks to keep everybody happy. He even comped a lot of the extra flaming shots for us!

The music was heart-thumpingly loud and was provided by our resident music artists.

 

 
And we have a lot of them, it seems. While some were too shy to sing, some won't even give up the mic and staged their own personal concert. Props to Joseph, Jez, Andrei, Scooby, and our OJTrainee Kim for taking time out to practice even after office hours. These guys truly rocked!


The laughter was genuine, not to mention hearty. 

A deadly combination of alcohol, special talent numbers, and parlor games made us all split our sides laughing like there's no tomorrow (we were actually thinking there wouldn't be one...hello, end of the world).

The humor might be lost in translation, so just look at the pictures to get an idea of how fun it was that night.

Happy to be here! :)

And they weren't even boozed up yet.

Cheers and catcalls...when JA showed up as Psy to dance Gangnam Style!

The boys laughing at Hapie, who just got eliminated from Musical Chairs

Laughing at the bartenders' facial expression when they were flairtending

There were amazing gifts and raffle prizes. 

See the kiddies happily scramble to put in their names for the raffle!

Up for grabs were two 8GB flash drives, Logitech laptop speakers, mice (2 pcs A4Tech mouse), a grey-and-orange sports watch from Spyder, gift certificates from Starbucks and Krispy Kreme, IMAX Theater tickets, and random loot bag prizes of chocolates and candy.

Special prizes also went out to the most deserving team members:

NANINGKAMOT AWARD (Most Improved) - Pat

30 DAYS OF NIGHT AWARD (Performer of the Month) - Andrei

GAHOTERA OF THE YEAR (Best Costume Effort every Themed Fridays) - Gianina

And Marlon and Wilma each got well-deserved kudos for coming very early to the office as well as for taking care of everybody and offering assistance whenever needed. We are truly very lucky to have them on the team!

This team composed of Ayra, JA, JC, Earvin, and Jez, won the Best Team Presentation of the Night. It was actually in the bag, the moment JA donned those shades...more so when he galloped around a la Psy, mouthing "Oppa Gangnam Style!" and bouncing around on the dance floor.

The gifts under the tree.

The party went on into the wee hours of the morning and needless to say, everybody had a blast. We kinda felt a little bit cheated when the 22nd dawned and no horsemen came with the sunrise, or at least weird wonky alien overlords floating around blasting everything to bits. Oh well, life goes on then. And we weren't all the worse for it as we really had a pre-apocalyptic good time...not to mention a new post-apocalyptic lease on life!

Thank you to the generous Ingenuity benefactors for providing everything for us. The whole year would not be possible without you! Gigantic thanks are also in order for everybody who organized the party and made it a fun, laughter-filled activity of sorts (Gik and Baia with the help of Marlon and Wilma).

It was truly a very merry Christmas party!!

More pictures here and here. Enjoy and have a blessed 2013!