Startup Weekend Davao 2 - A Success! :)

Startup Weekend 2 came early this year! 

Last August 9 until August 11, 2013 all roads led to 1.18 Centron Bldg., Quirino St. for the 2nd Startup Weekend Davao event.

For those who don't know what the Startup Weekend is, it's an event which originated from Seattle, Washington in the US where attendees will pitch potential revenue-earning ideas, build teams to develop such ideas, pitch to investors and peers, and launch a startup company based on this idea! Easy peasy, macaroni cheesy!

Let us show you what went down in a photo-heavy post.

Ingenuity's Gik and Baia handled registration with Eli, and two of his Carve staff:

We got this.

Jan helped out some in time-keeping so here he is posing here with the Register Ladies:

An icebreaker game before starting. Yeah, ruthless.

Everyone got into the groove of things and ended up being crazily competitive:

John & Judah joining in on the fray

Ichii from Team Keep Up! and Henjie from Team News Cues battling it out for Rock, Paper War supremacy!

Then it was time to introduce the mentors to the Startup participants.

L-R: Dulce, Tina Amper of techtalks.ph, Pia Bernal of Kickstart Ventures, Jun Jison of Accelerate Desk, Jong Tujan of Neuraltech Innovations, Ray Rubio of Cubepixels, June Millan of Ingenuity, Chris Cubos of Phil. Global Outsourcing, and Sir Bert of ICT Davao

mentors just mentoring around with Judge Judah of Triple I Consulting (rightmost)

then they finally get tired and just sat down to chill out and eat..while still talking nonstop

Pitches were then the next order of business. 

With at least 12 pitches to choose from, the attendees surely had a hard time choosing which ones to vote for and develop. Ultimately, these guys were the hailed as the Chosen Ones -

Stories (which became Plym), Pbenefits, DreamCatcher and Barter Epic (which later on merged and became BarterHound), Keep Up!, Agri and Car Alarm (which later on became Txtfuly)

The participants teamed up and worked on their thang with this in mind:

Hello, second day! Time to command and conquer!!

Everybody's working on their projects and the mentors and organizers staged talks to give them ammunition needed to finish their stuff.

Mentors sat with them and gave good critique to guide them through the project development phase, ironing out the kinks, and running their idea through a fine sieve.

And on the third day before the Hour of Judgement, the teams dry runs their pitches through the panel of mentors, organizers, and kibitzers for more trial by fire refining process. Goal: Pitch Perfection

Ma'am Tins, ang strict naman ng beauty!

While everything was going on, the judges came trickling in from all over and while they weren't still needed at the event, they enjoyed themselves in and around Davao.

The judges with Tom, Sir Bert, Dulce and John

L-R: Ralph Wunsch of Metrodeal, Tom, Sir Bert, Dulce, Atty. Sam Matunog President of ICT Davao, Justin Cooke of Empire Flippers, Judah Hirsch of Triple I, Runar Petursson of Betur, and John

Finally, it was time for the final pitching!

After everyone has presented their 3 days' worth of banana-fueled, multiple meal-punctuated hard work, and quite a heart-stopping judges' deliberation, the winners are:

3rd place - PLYM (Place Your Mark)

college students Ray Saavedra (ADDU), Hitesh Dhanwani (ADDU), Guy Magayano (UIC), and Nap Calub (ADDU) (the one who first thought of the idea)

2nd place - Pbenefits.co

Ma. Linnet B. Viloria, Nick Carpio Mesias, Sheenah Seto, Fernando Azucena, Gretchil Sayon

1st place - Keep Up!

Alex Eneco - Team Keep Up! Lead

Ichii Villaruz, Mary Mynell B. Mariano, Jasper M. Adlaon with Angel, Dulce, and Gay

Congratulations all around for everyone who won! :)

We then ended the event with the traditional super duper group picture galore

Thanks to everyone who came and attended - those who bravely shared their ideas, offered help, organized, mentored, judged, provided our meals and drinks, those who cleaned up, did small stuff, big stuff, doesn't matter! We all are grateful for the combined efforts of everybody on this event. 

See yous, next year guysies!

But before that, we all shall go to Boracay for the Geeks on a Beach conference.

PEACE OUT!

More photos here, here, and here! Click click click! :)

iOS6 Problems: autoLayout and UI customization

When developing on iOS6 using Xcode, you might notice some changes. A few of these changes may have been documented while some were not. Still, one should read the documentations that Apple will release every update on iOS - especially developers.

One of the changes that Apple implemented is the new autoLayout feature. This feature makes creating interfaces much easier. It supports different screen sizes in your app and even makes internationalization almost trivial (no more new nibs or storyboards for languages you wish to support).

Even with this feature, there are times when you have to override the way the interface looks. Most of the time, we put the code in the viewDidLoad method then run the app and see the changes we made to the UI only to discover that it doesn't take effect at all or much worse, the UI is now messed up.

Why is this happening?

The reason is that you enabled autoLayout on the nib and put the code in the wrong method.

But isn't that where we usually put the code to alter some of the UI elements?

Yes, but if you are using autoLayout then you need to put it in a different method.

Where do we put the code then?

If you are using autoLayout and have some code to alter the UI, instead of putting it in the viewDidLoad method, you should put it in the viewDidLayoutSubviews.

As it turns out, the UI is rendered after the viewDidLoad is called so the changes to the UI are now gone and the app is rendered to how it should look by the autoLayout. The viewDidLayoutSubviews was created on iOS6 to accommodate any changes that will occur after the rendering. These changes may be in the UI or within the code itself.

So the next time you are developing in iOS6 and using the autoLayout feature, make sure to design your UI properly so you don't have to put some extra code to alter it. If you need to add some additional code after the layout is done, put in the viewDidLayoutSubviews instead of other methods. Also, read the documentation as it really helps a lot.

Taming the Snake Part 2

We have always wanted to give back to the general IT community. Not for applause or anything, but out of a genuine want to help Davao City achieve renown as the next Silicon Valley of the Philippines. Sure, we may still be quite far off, but we're taking baby steps toward that goal.

As you know, we have partnered up with Developers Connect for a free seminar-workshop entitled Taming the Python and last August 2, 2013 was the second event of the series. This seminar-workshop aims to teach developers, teachers, students, industry practitioners, and whoever might be interested to learn Python, the most sought-after programming language right now.

Ingenuity's own Python developers were the ones who were asked by DevCon to provide the workshop for the attendees and Koon Soberano, Kevin Milo, Ayra Diaz, and our very own Chief Technical Officer June Millan stepped up to the plate.

We will always look forward to helping those who would want to earnestly learn the skills and we would gladly impart to them the tricks of the trade. We believe that we Davaoeños should help each other achieve our common goal, especially when it will affect the life of everyone here in a great and positive way.

So we say, AJA! Aja to everyone who pour their time and effort into this endeavor --- and may we all find success at the end of the road! See you all soon! :)

"Branching" Translations

There will come a time when the website being created needs to be translated to different languages. What if we needed different translations while we are on the same language setting? What happens next?

This is where playing with APIs beyond their defaults comes into play. What I did is basically use a different compiled binary translation file for the GNUTranslations class to use. I am probably one of those devious devs in my circle whose never handled (or survived in) a Django project before, so bear with me. The software stack used in this project is:

• Twisted
• Rammi
• Babel
• Jinja2
• txTemplate

Using formsets in handling multiple identical forms in a single page

Problem:

We have a page with identical repeating forms on a single page.

For example:

• adding resources for an article
• adding an item in a to do list
• creating a simple questionnaire

Answer:

Django makes this easy for you with the use of formsets.

Sample App:

Here is a simple questionnaire app which creates questions easily using the concept of formsets.

Connecting an iOS App to Django-Tastypie

Developing an iOS App sometimes needs a REST API Server to communicate with and handle most of the app’s data. So how should we start in developing the connection between an iOS app to a REST API Server?

I have developed a few iOS apps and basically the basic workflow I currently have in developing that kind of app is:

1.     Use a networking library to connect to the web service.

2.     Download the server response (JSON, XML and etc.).

3.     Parse the response by transforming it into an NSDictionary or NSArray.

4.     Handle or display the data retrieved from the NSDictionary or NSArray.

And "poof" you now have a working iOS app connecting to a REST API Server. Sounds simple right? So to start the tutorial lets first talk about the needed tools in order to start the app development.

XCode and Objective-C

You are going to develop an iOS app surely you should know about XCode and Objective-C? So for those who still don’t have any idea about XCode and Objective-C there are quite a lot of great tutorials on the web probably you could start on Apple’s “Your First iOS App”.

Networking Library

Your app couldn’t live without networking and to add to it, networking is hard. There are quite various parts and factors that you really need to understand and consider to make it work.  There is already NSURLConnection on Apple’s Foundation framework to handle networking however like I said it’s hard to understand. Fortunately, a quite few open-source libraries have emerged to make networking easy. Thank God for open-source. 

One such library is AFNetworking, created and maintained by the awesome people of Gowalla, which its former name is “Alamofire”(Where they based “AF” for the name AFNetworking, cool). It is an easy to use network API for iOS. It contains everything you need to interface with online resources, web services to file downloads. It also helps you ensure that your UI is still responsive even when your app is in the middle of a large download. There are other networking libraries out there but I find AFNetworking as the library that is fit for our app.

REST API Server

Aside from being an iOS developer I am also a Python-Django Developer. So I have decided to use Python as the language and Django as its web framework for the REST API Server. And yes, I mentioned on the tutorial’s title Django so probably most of you who are viewing this page should have already an idea regarding about Python and Django. If not there are quite a few resources on the web regarding Python and Django. 

 So moving on, basically we need to create an API framework from scratch. Just kidding, why create when there are open-sourced API frameworks ready to be implemented on your Django app, unless you really want to create your own REST API framework for your app (so hardcore… lol). Choosing from the list of known API frameworks, we previously chose django-rest-framework (version 0.4.0, I know it’s an old version…lol) to be used on our REST API Server however just recently we started working on Django-TastyPie. So why use Django-TastyPie? I guess they have good documentation, found out it was basically mostly used to connect to an iOS app, good community and other reasons are found on there “Why TastyPie” section on github.

We are hosting the 2nd Davao Start Up Weekend!!

Starting August 9, 2013, a lot of people will be in our office. This is because the 2nd Start Up Weekend Davao is going to be held here at the Ingenuity HQ and we could not be more excited about it!

Last year, John was invited at the 1st Start Up Weekend Davao to be a mentor to the participant teams. This year, he stepped up to the plate and became one of the organizers together with the IT industry movers and shakers in Davao City, the original dynamic triumvirate of Dulce Lada, Angel Abella, and Gay Viray; Andrew dela Serna of Piclyf & Davao Bloggers; Tom Secuya of Carve; and Bert Barriga of ICT Davao. Ingenuity is also a Platinum Sponsor of the event and our Chief Technology Officer June is also one of the mentors!

We will also be sponsoring the top two teams from our OJT Project Building Program (Team Possibilities and Team Soft Copy) to join in this year's SW. We are looking forward to this event as last year, the 2 teams Ingenuity sent off to join the 1st SW were among the Top 10, with Team JumpIn bagging 3rd place. :)

John, Bryan, Gay, Dulce, Tom, June (shy guys not facing the camera) in one of their planning sessions

Andrew, Bryan, Gay, Angel S., Angel A. (an overabundance of "angels") at another brainstorming meeting

Tom, June, Bert, Dwayne, and Angel A. hard at work

Startup Weekend, with their tag line "No Talk. All action." is an international event broken down into 3 days (or roughly 54 hours) that brings together developers, designers, prod managers, marketers, investors, and other startup enthusiast to share ideas, form teams, build products, and at the end of all that, hopefully attract investors to launch a startup!

Intensive information dissemination across all forms of media have been done by the organizers and their staff to invite more Davaoenos to come and join.

For more information on how to join in on this event, please jump on down to the Startup Weekend Davao official website.

See you all!

JC goes to the Gym

One of the fringe benefits in working for Ingenuity is that we get to enjoy a subsidized gym subscription. Ever since this started, there never was one as passionate about going to the gym as JC.

Would you believe he started as this little, stick-thin figure little boy?

He started going to the gym and well, he went from that ^ to this...

Ok, nevermind Koon.

He went some more and look where he is in his life right now!

JC, second row (standing), fifth from left

photo credit: Rudolph Alama for Holiday Gym Superbodies Search '13

We are all watching JC strut his stuff and his rippling pectorals later at the Holiday Gym Superbodies Search 2013 at Abreeza Mall, Davao City. If you want to come with, lezzgow and cheer him on! Show starts at 6pm!

Good luck JC!!!