AZGiveCamp is Breaking the Mold
Posted by bsstahl on 2016-08-11 and Filed Under: event
The organizing team of AZGiveCamp recently announced that we would be hosting a one-day Hackathon for Humanitarian Toolbox on Saturday, August 27th, from 8:30 am to 5pm at Ticketmaster in Scottsdale, AZ. This event is a bit of a departure for us. We have been looking for ways to evolve the organization to host more and different coding-for-charity events while continuing our mission to to help charitable and non-profit organizations in our community meet their technology needs. We hope you’ll join us for this first experiment with other event types at AZGiveCamp.
AZGiveCamp’s flagship event is our Hackathon of Help. We have had the privilege of hosting 7 such events in the Valley of the Sun so far, with our 8th scheduled for March of 2017. These events take up an entire weekend and are designed to put multiple charity and non-profit organizations together with multiple development teams. The teams are tasked with taking a project from idea to completion in the course of one weekend. During these events, participants may chose to camp out at the event facility, stay up and work on their projects, or go home at night, returning to continue the project in the morning until the final turnover on Sunday afternoon. These events are technology agnostic, with the specific technologies to be used determined by the teams themselves.
By contrast, the AZGiveCamp Humanitarian Toolbox Hackathon will be only a 1-day event. Participants will work on a single project, the Humanitarian Toolbox (htBox) allReady project, for which the technologies, design, and many of the features have already been chosen and implemented. We will be lending our support to this worthy organization by adding features, upgrading tooling, and writing tests against the existing code base. This event will not be judged by how many projects we complete, but by how much better-off the project is when we are done.
For those not familiar with Humanitarian Toolbox, they are an organization that sets up projects to assist humanitarian organizations. Their current project, dubbed allReady, is designed to organize the preparedness campaigns of the Red Cross and other disaster response groups. The project is implemented in ASP.NET Core MVC with a Cordova client. Participants need to have at least a basic comfort level with one or both of these technologies, along with the appropriate development tools, to be an effective contributor to this project. Specifics of the required tools can be found on the event page on Meetup.
We hope you’ll join us at this and future AZGiveCamp events.
Are you Ready for the Next Episode?
Posted by bsstahl on 2015-06-29 and Filed Under: development
In the last episode of “Refactoring my App Development Mojo”, I explained how I had discovered my passion for building Windows Store applications by using a hybrid solution of HTML5 with very minimal JavaScript, bound to a view-model written in C# running as a Windows Runtime Component, communicating with services written in C# using WCF. The goal was to do as much of the coding as possible in the technologies I was very comfortable with, C# and HTML, and minimize the use of those technologies which I had never gotten comfortable with, namely JavaScript and XAML.
While this was an interesting and somewhat novel approach, it turned out to have a few fairly significant drawbacks:
- Using this hybrid approach meant there were two runtimes that had to be initialized and operating during execution, a costly drain on system resources, especially for mobile devices.
- Applications built using this methodology would run well on Windows 8 and 8.1 machines, as well as Windows Phone devices, but not on the web, or on Android or iDevices.
- The more complex the applications became, the more I hand to rely on JavaScript anyway, even despite putting as much logic as possible into the C# layers.
On top of these drawbacks, I now feel like it is time for me to get over my fear of moving to JavaScript. Yes, it is weakly typed (at least for now). Yes, its implementation of many object-oriented concepts leave a lot to be desired (at least for now), yes, it can sometimes make you question your own logical thinking, or even your sanity, with how it handles certain edge-cases. All that being said however, JavaScript, in some form, is the clear winner when it comes to web applications. There is no question that, if you are building standard front-ends for you applications, you need JavaScript.
So, it seems that it is time for me to move to a more standard front-end development stack. I need one that is cross-platform, ideally providing a good deployment story for web, PC, tablet & phone, and supporting all major platforms including Android, iDevices & Windows phones and tablets. It also needs to be standards-based, and work using popular frameworks so that my apps can be kept up-to-date with the latest technology.
I believe I have found this front-end platform in Apache Cordova. Cordova takes HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 apps that can already work on the web, and builds them into hybrid apps that can run on virtually any platform including iPhones and iPads, Android phones and tablets, and Windows PCs, phones and tablets. Cordova has built-in support in Visual Studio 2015, which I have been playing with for a little while and seems to have real promise. There is also the popular Ionic Framework for building Cordova apps which I plan to learn more about over the next few weeks.
I’ll keep you informed of my progress and let you know if this does indeed turn out to be the best way for me to build apps. Stay tuned.
Barry S. Stahl (he/him/his) - Barry is a .NET Software Engineer who has been creating business solutions for enterprise customers since the mid 1980s. Barry is also an Election Integrity Activist, baseball and hockey fan, husband of one genius and father of another, and a 40 year resident of Phoenix Arizona USA. When Barry is not traveling around the world to speak at Conferences, Code Camps and User Groups or to participate in GiveCamp events, he spends his days as a Solution Architect for Carvana in Tempe AZ and his nights thinking about the next AZGiveCamp event where software creators come together to build websites and apps for some great non-profit organizations.