iCode 2010 - A Programming Contest
Posted 20th April, 2010 by Amar Ravikumar
A few of us here at the chapter had wanted to organize a programming contest in NUS for quite some time. Not only are competitions a lot of fun but there is also a lot of learning involved in the process and that is why we really pushed for it this semester and finally went about organizing it.
iCode was a purely online programming contest except for the finals that was held in one of the programming labs. The competition which was spread over four weeks from March 16 to April 12 wouldn't have been possible without the support and guidance of Steven Halim from the Faculty of Computing and his competitive programming team. All the problems for the weekly contests and the finals were set by them.
We were thoroughly overwhelmed by the initial response to the contest. Although we sent the publicity mail only to students from the School of Computing, we had nearly a hundred signups by the end of the day. We were tempted to keep the registrations open and bring in more folks to participate but we had to close it in the end as we were keen on keeping the number in check.
Microsoft Silverlight Workshop
Posted 10th February, 2010 by Amar Ravikumar
We were able to organize this event on February 8th with the help and support of Microsoft Singapore. Apurva Lawale from Microsoft came over and conducted the two-hour long workshop for around twenty five students in the programming lab, COM1/B12 at the School of Computing.
Silverlight is a browser plugin that provides a developer with the tools to create powerful web applications easily. It is comparable, in principle, to Adobe's Flash and is simpler to use.
The workshop was focussed on helping students integrate Silverlight with their .NET applications, and was found helpful mainly by participants who have also taken the software engineering courses, CS3215 and CS2103 this semester.
The student chapter will be bringing similar developer events to NUS in the future, in partnership with Microsoft, to help students who are considering participating in the Imagine Cup in the best way possible.
Mosync Primer
Posted 2nd February, 2010 by Amar Ravikumar
Mosync is an open source, cross-platform mobile application development suite developed by Sweden based startup, Mobilesorcery. To get students to understand how powerful an application Mosync is, we were really happy to bring Aaron Chan, the regional director of Mobilesorcery for a quick Mosync 101 workshop on February 1st.
The workshop held in COM1/PL3 was attended by nearly twenty five students. Aaron talked about the benefits of using a cross-platform solution to mobile app development and how Mosync planned to expand to the rising Android and iPhone platforms soon.
With the help of a Twitter client demo, participants learnt how they could start developing quickly just with a free SDK download and by using the comprehensive online documentation and other resources on the site. Aaron also took some time-off to talk about the first-ever Mosync Developer Challenge and encouraged students to take part in the same.