Tuxedo '15 SJCE - Firefox OS App days
I was studying for what will probably be my last internal when Abhiram pinged me saying he’s in SJCE and I saw this tweet from him as proof.
Tuxedo ‘15 is IEEE SJCE’s odd semester technical fest. And it is about open-source software.
Apart from Firefox OS app day, they had workshops about git and blender as I came to know later.
So, I dropped my books and ran to the venue after lunch. I ran straight to the CS block hoping it’d be there, but I had to call Ashwin to find out the actual venue (which was in admin block).
At the venue, everyone had just came back from lunch as I said hi to Abraar and Abhiram. There was Sandesh too whom I’m meeting for the first time. Sandesh is a researcher who works on server-client stuff.
Abraar quickly talked about CSS selectors and afterwards the audience divided into groups to start working on an app.
Audience
The audience had a fair share of beginners and people more experienced with HTML, CSS, and javascript. They were more used to C, from what I heard.
Problems faced
- People were having difficulty in figuring out which files (in boilerplate apps) were doing what. Especially when apps used frameworks like bootstrap or jquery, they would get stumped trying to decipher the entire machine generated code.
- Internet was a problem, as usual with all events.
Bugs faced
- Most computers were offline and WebIDE failed to create new apps because of that. Had to fix those by connecting to wifi for a second to allow WebIDE to download the templates it needed.
- The LocateMe app which was given to one team to learn geolocation API wasn’t running correctly on the simulator. Turns out it was some kind of a bug with fetching google api via the Web. I could make it work by downloading the google hosted javascript and putting it along the other offline files.
- There was also a very old Firefox OS device which wasn’t getting detected by adb. Abhiram probably fixed it by adding a udev rule.
Interesting apps coming up
- The team working with geolocation was building a Women Safety app that relies on geolocation.
- There was another team creating a Kannada dictionary
- More teams were working on more things, but I couldn’t see everyone’s code.