What we’re up to this month

Interesting Stuff Club

Our regular trip into the boardroom to discuss what we’re working on in our own time, what we’d like to learn more about, and discuss any meetups we’re going to. This was the first Interesting Stuff Club for our newest recruits Alvaro, James and VJ, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t have anything to say.

Dardan Muhaxheri – Junior Developer

Since the last ISC I’ve read more of the Clean Code book, which is really useful. The chapter structure is great: the beginning outlines good practice followed by why it’s good.
In my own time I have been working on an AngularJS music app with a Node.js backend, and I had an interesting idea of wanting to be able to see events, or artist concerts based on location. This was harder than I thought to implement though. I am using last.fm’s API which shows the city and then I was using the coordinates from the users’ browser. However, it was difficult to compare the distance between the two coordinates using Google’s reverse geocoding API as it only allowed me to list concerts by city, as opposed to proximity. After further research I’ve found a better solution - R-Tree data structure but this looks like it will be quite time consuming to implement.

Eddy Lane – Backend Developer

I’m still working on my (seemingly never ending) podcast project. I’ve stopped using HTTP basic authorisation in favour of creating my own OAuth2 server with the FOSOAuthServerBundle using the Resource Owner Password flow. Heroku recently took PHP out of beta support so I’ve got my application up on there, deploying with a git push is great. AngularFire (Firebase angular adaptor) was updated to 0.8 with some awesome (breaking) changes so that required a few hours of refactoring. I’ve also begun converting the frontend desktop version to a packaged chrome application, which allows me to do cool things like sync downloaded episodes between clients sharing the same Google account. It has some restrictions so I’ve had to refactor some of my existing codebase, but it’s been well worth it. I’ll be talking about my experiences in an upcoming blog…

James Dowell – Junior Frontend Developer

Due to a recent interest I have in finance and shares, I’m creating an app which will allow users to search companies to see what their current stock prices are, and also save companies of interest or companies they have stocks in. Users can enter the price they paid for any stocks they own and see in real time what they are worth, and how much money they may have made, or lost. I’ve used Firebase and Node.js to create the app using Google’s finance API, which grabs stock prices every 2 minutes.
I’ve also been reading the Sass for Web Designers book, which is helpful as all of the examples are relevant and I bought Kirsten’s favourite, The Lean Startup to read on my upcoming holiday.

Alvaro Nistal – Digital Designer

I’ve just begun creating a simple web app to solve a problem that my girlfriend has. She works in a hotel and often needs to know when the last trains run, but there seems to be no app at present to tell you when they are. Hopefully I will have made some good progress on this by next Interesting Stuff Club.
I’m reading Eloquent Javascript but this is going slowly as it’s a steep learning curve for me. Other than that I’ve been looking for some new music as I want to work on some new mixes.

VJ Patel – Junior Developer

Before I started at UVD I was trying to teach myself Symfony and AngluarJS. My friend introduced me to a project which is basically LinkedIn specifically for game developers. I spent a week working on validation with AngluarJS but I made a mess of it and have not really done a lot since! Eddy did mention that he gave James a good AngularJS validation project, so I could maybe have a look at that..!

Rachael Grocott – Marketing

We recently attended Digital Revolution at the Barbican on a little office outing, which we all really enjoyed as there was something for everyone. I personally enjoyed the nostalgia of getting to play on all of the old games I grew up with; pong, Game Boy and SEGA Megadrive to name a few. I’m also a big fan of eBoy, so it was nice to see some of their work, then last week The Verge released a rare interview with them which was cool.
I’ve also been reading up a lot about productivity recently and understanding what times in the day are best for achieving certain tasks. For example, I am definitely a morning person, so if I have anything to do that requires a lot of brain power, I’ll always do this first thing. I’m also a firm believer in taking a break away from your desk at lunch time, and eating the right foods. (I’ve also been reading about the benefits of midday naps, but I won’t go into that…)