#wegotcoders

Intro to Ruby

This week’s been an introduction to Ruby.  Strings, Control Structures, Data Structures, Methods, Classes & Objects and Code Blocks.

Transport for London Project

As part of the Data Structures track, we’ve been working on a command line app that plans a user's journey on the London Underground - Transport For London.  This involves modelling a subsection of the tube network, prompting a user for their start and end stations, and printing out their route.

We chose to model the tube sub-network using a hash of arrays, and began the process with a procedural approach, prompting the user for input along the way.

I’ve been working on refactoring the code with an object-oriented approach, using a Journey class and initializing each journey object with a start and finish station.  

Here’s the code so far: TFL Project

I’ve encapsulated each procedure within a method, so that the code prints out the stations between the user’s start and finish stations.  If they need to change lines to complete their journey, Oxford Circus is the intersection point.

There’s 6 general journey outcomes:

Travelling eastbound on one line

Travelling westbound on one line

Travelling eastbound on more that one line

Travelling westbound on more that one line

Travelling eastbound, changing at oxford circus, and continuing westbound on another line

Travelling westbound, changing at oxford circus, and continuing eastbound on another line

Next Steps

Adding control flow so that the relevant method is called when a journey is entered.

The world's first global summit for ending sexual violence in conflict took place this week in London, at the London ExCel center. Hosted by the Foreign Secretary William Hague and UN ambassador Angelina Jolie, the summit was combined with a public exhibition, that brought together charities, NGOs, governments and activists, to help raise awareness, support victims and find solutions to this very difficult issue.

Amongst the fringe events was the first ever hackathon, aimed at finding practical solutions to sexual violence in conflict (SVC), where teams of volunteers, activists, survivors, diplomats, creatives, managers and coders got together to realise new ideas towards helping SVC survivors and improve communication amongst NGOs and activists.

In just 48 hours, the team brainstorms solutions to the ideas, and rapidly puts together tech solutions that prove the concept. We ended up using many of the tools that we have been learning about on the course: padrino, rails, cucumber, gems, github, HTML & CSS and Google maps.

After three days of ardour, hardly any sleep and a lot of fun, the We Got Coders trainees managed to get a basic prototype of each idea. Our trainees Serafeim Maroulis (@reykowgc) and Lianne Tan (@L_t15), worked on a concept for a volunteering platform, which combined Google maps and volunteer information in a Rails application, designed to help NGO's find local voltuneers and build a local support network. Dan Hassan (@dan_mi_sun), Dami Odelola (@damzcodes), Zoltan Biber (@ZoltanBiber) and myself worked on a concept to help find displaced people missing from within refugee camps, that used facial recognition technology to help NGOs collate photograph data and find potential matches.

The latter project was selected for the people's choice award, where £500 seed funding was awarded to the group. The prize went to the team with the most votes on the EndSVC website, with the majority of the votes coming from the exhibition delegates. We are now in discussions with the organisers, Chaynl, and our teammates (@miqueltubert) and (@SweetnutDesign) as to where to take the project next.

If you are an NGO, angel investor, programmer or are interested in working with us on this or any other project related to the topic, please get in touch. We are willing to sponsor a project of this kind by providing the technical expertise and time to get this off the ground; now we are looking to build on our success and take the project to the next level. Please contact [email protected] and we would be happy to hear from you.

Many thanks go out the event organisers and the lovely people @chaynl for putting the together the event (and for all the free chocolates!)

One of our first clients to employ We Got Coders trainees, HiHostels, are a global federation of Hostel accommodation providers. With the help of our consultants, they have recently completed a project to migrate their bookings and point of sale platform onto a modern, API-backed, service-orientated architecture. After a 14-month multiple-supplier software build, HiHostels found that the return on investment with the agency model gradually produced diminishing returns, and began consider other approaches to provision software development. We asked Operations Director Ivan Salcedo what his rationale was for working with We Got Coders to provide junior developers for their development team.

“We faced a series of headaches on a major e-commerce project; we were running behind schedule, running out of budget and we still had a large amount of work to complete before we could launch the project. Our appointed web agency were delivering less and less value for money, and other specialist agencies would not take the project on without rebuilding the code from the ground up. We were in a tricky position.

Enter We Got Coders. Dan was personally recommended by people I trust in the industry, and I was struck both by his passion for web development and his faith in his students. But what impressed me most was the commitment, dedication and talent of the developers that he had been working with. The project presentations would shame many “professional’ developers, and so we arranged to take two alumni for three months.

Commercially, this made a lot of sense to us. We could afford more resource than through a “conventional’ agency, and we had the security of knowing an experienced senior developer would be on hand to mentor, guide and get stuck in to the code if required.

Dan had assessed our codebase before committing to the project, and was able to advise as to whether his junior developers would be up to the task. They didn't flinch from the challenge; within a very short space of time both developers were contributing direct improvements to our codebase and at the end of the twelve week placement I had no hesitation in offering both of them contracts.

If you are looking for skilled, committed and eager developers, I strongly recommend using We Got Coders; whether in a situation where you are looking to control costs, are building a new team or you are actively looking to bring a fresh perspective to your current dev team. I was impressed by the wider industry experience that the We Got Coders consultants bring with them, as well as a resolute approach to coding using industry best practices with Test Driven Development and Agile development.”