Skip to main content

Google I/O '18


Here are my top 5 impressions on this conference.

Gmail - live sentence suggestion

It looked like the way developers use intelligent code completion in an IDE when coding.

Google Photos: converting a photo has a document to pdf

I have a paid app on my iPad called "Scanner for Me" but now I can use Google Photos instead. ;)

Google Assistant: bot makes a real call to book a restaurant dinner or a hair salon

Wow! This feature, for me, is really a big innovation. My team is working so hard on building our bot which is able to have a continued conversation. Google is so good!

Google Maps: using Phone's camera to watch the direction

When I saw a fox as a cicerone on the demo, I was thinking of Pokémon GO.

Google Lens: extract text from images

I have heard a story from a friend of me that he had to use his app about "optical character recognition (OCR)" to scan and translate the texts into English whenever he saw texts in China. Google Lens would be a good helper for him now.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Set up a web server for learning HTTP headers

Motivation We all follow the client-server model using the HTTP protocol for most of our web apps today. In development, we simply may have a backend API server and a frontend (web pages or mobile apps) only. However, it seemed that a proxy server is always required for production. In fact, most of the hardest issues in production come from integration. The requests and responses might be modified by the proxy server. Therefore, the understanding of HTTP protocol is one of the key skills to resolve those issues. I wanted to dive deep into HTTP with some core concepts such as caching, cookies, and CORS. I didn't intend to go quickly rather than moved slowly to have a well understanding of what I do. Prepare a server The easiest way is to use my laptop as a server then I can just use "localhost". I can also use ngrok to make my web server online. Finally, I use an online tool such as RedBot to check the HTTP headers. To make it more excited though, I deployed the app on A...

What the heck is Meteor DDP?

I was using Meteor for my messenger project. I was so curious about the real time connection. I wanted to know how exactly this mechanism works. In this post, I will go through the DDP Specification, an overview of WebSocket, and a simple demo about how to subscribe a publication of Rocket.Chat (containing a DDP server) from an external webpage. At a glance, I knew that Meteor invented a protocol called DDP which uses for handling real time connection. So then, what is DDP? "DDP (Distributed Data Protocol) is the stateful WebSocket protocol that Meteor uses to communicate between the client and the server." [1] All right! Why does DDP matter? "DDP is a standard way to solve the biggest problem facing client-side JavaScript developers: querying a server-side database, sending the results down to the client, and then pushing changes to the client whenever anything changes in the database" . [2] In order to understand deeply the protocol, I decided ...

Awareness of Product Development

Software development can be understood simply as a program to receive inputs (i.e customer needs) and then produce outputs (i.e working software). It is worth it to know how many steps are in that program. When something gets stuck in a step, everyone is aware of that. The first painting of my son The General Process Big Picture There are two main factors in this picture including the people with roles and their interactions. All people involved in developing the product know their responsibilities clearly and how to make things done right. Therefore, a good collaboration can be reached. Product Roadmap Contribution It would be great for developers to know what the next features to work on are as well as when those features will be delivered. Therefore, the product roadmap is very important. The items in the roadmap should be contributed by ALL people involved in the product. Because software engineers directly develop, test, delivery, and monitor the software, they should also contrib...

DevOps Toolchain Enhancement

 Historically, our company ubitec had started with a customer project. Agile/Scrum was our proposal for working with customers. Time by time, Agile/Scrum also became our culture for software development. To be successful with this development approach, we somehow needed to have a fast release for customers (i.e. every one week). Back then, we had a build tool Jenkins which was responsible for having sprint release packages for our customers. The build job pipelines contain some steps such as gathering the artifacts, checking the code convention, running the tests, building docker images, and packaging an archived file (a zip file). The set of tools involved in a pipeline is roughly called a toolchain. It is just a part of a bigger process called the DevOps toolchain. Source: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-archive/2016/11/devops-architecture-available-on-bluemix-garage-method-site/ DevOps is a proven method that fits Agile. Today,  it is even treated as a mandatory factor...

The power of acceptance test

User Story is the place PO gives his ideas about features so that developers are able to know what requirements are. Acceptance tests are these show the most valuable things of the features represented by some specific cases. Usually PO defines them, but not always. Therefore, refining existing acceptance tests – even defining new ones that cover all features of the User Story must be a worth task. Acceptance test with Given When Then pattern If we understand what we are going to do, we can complete it by 50% I have worked with some members those just start implementing the features one by one and from top to down of the User Story description. Be honest, I am the one used to be. What a risky approach! Because it might meet a case that is very easy to miss requirements or needs to re-work after finding any misunderstood things. I have also worked with some members those accept spending a long time to clarify the User Story. Reading carefully of whole User Story by defining...