event organizer

Read more about the article How do we work? Agile

How do we work? Agile

It’s not typical team. We don’t meet face-to-face each other on daily basis, one trouble is that we have to work from different time zones, and we have different operating system, the way of working, or even culture. But we are FOSSASIA Open Event team of six amazing developers so it does not discourage us to achieve our goals.

But even if we experience all these things we have to learn how to work together successfully. We are trying, and I think it is becoming better and better every day, the Agile methodology.

So first of all, before coding started, we had prepared user stories in issues. Every issue had been very well documented, and we had divided each issue to smaller ones. It brings us a lot of benefits, because it doesn’t matter where you work. If sub issue is empty you can take it. Due to the fact that issue is very well documented you don’t need to even ask someone what to do. This case saves a lot of time. I know that writing clear issues is very boring and It could seemed not to be beneficial, but it’s. We are still trying to improve our performance and we are looking for new opportunities where and how we can improve our work, without lost quality of our development process.

Then, we have one week sprint (milestones). It helps us to control our work and we know where are we, what have we done, and what is still to do. We know if our speed is enough or we have to move faster. And it also enables us to see our progress.Screen Shot 2016-06-25 at 11.27.08.png

Moreover, we have daily scrums. We answer three following questions – what did you do yesterday, what do you plan to do today and what is preventing you from achieving your goals. Furthermore, we follow continues integration system. We push code to our common Open Event repository on daily basis. It helps us to control our code and fix bugs quickly. I am sure we will continue along this path, and successfully finish to code an amazing Open Event web app.

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Open Event Apk generator

So we made this apk generator currently hosted on a server (http://192.241.232.231) which let’s you generate an android app for your event in 10 minutes out of which the server takes about 8 minutes to build 😛 . So, essentially you just have to spare 2 minutes and just enter 3 things(email, Desired app’s name and Api link). Isn’t this cool?

So how exactly do we do this?

At the backend, we are running a python scripts with some shell scripts where the python script is basically creating directories, interacting with our firebase database to get the data entered by a user. So we made these scripts to first of all to clone the open event android repo, then customise and change the code in the repo according to the parameters entered by the organiser earlier(shown in the image).

Screen Shot 2016-06-14 at 12.13.12 AM
Generator Website

After the code has been changed by the scripts to customise the app according to the event the app will be used for, we move on to the script to build the apk, where we build and sign the apk in release mode using signing configs and release keys from the server because we don’t the organiser to generate keys and store it on the server to avoid the hassle and also the privacy concerns involving the keys. So this is when the apk is generated on the server. Now you have questions like the apk is generated but how do I get it? Do I have to wait on the same page for 10 minutes while the apk is being sent? The answer is no and yes. What I mean by this is that you can wait to download the apk if you want but we’ll anyways send it to your email you specified on the apk generator website. This is the sample Email we got when we were testing the system

Screen Shot 2016-06-14 at 12.08.59 AM.png

So it’s an end to end complete solution from which you can easily get an android app for your event in just 2 minutes. Would love to hear feedback and reviews. Please feel free to contact me @ manan13056@iiitd.ac.in or on social media’s(Twitter, Facebook). Adios!

P.S. : Here is the link to the scripts we’re using.

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Why should you use Heroku?

Last week I’ve dedicated most time to implement new heroku features to Open Event. Due to the fact that wasn’t easy tasks I can share my experience.

What is heroku?

Heroku is a cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages like Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go

Easy to deploy

what you need to do:

  1. Create account on heroku
  2. Download a heroku toolbelt to your enviroment.
  3. Go to your project directory(/open-event-orga-server)
  4. Sign in to heroku in your command line using your credentials 
    $ heroku login
  5. Create app with name $ 
    heroku apps:create your_app_name

    after execution above command you will recive a link to your application

    http://your_app_name.herokuapp.com/
  6. Push latest changes to heroku 
    $ git push heroku master
  7. If everythings is ok you can check results http://your_app_name.herokuapp.com/ (sometimes it does not work like we want 🙁 )

Easy to configure

To list/set/get config variables use:

$ heroku config
$ heroku config:set YOUR_VARIABLE=token123

$ heroku config:get YOUR_VARIABLE

or you can go to you application dashboard and make above operations

How you can get access to this variables using python langauges?

$ python

Python 2.7.10 (default, Oct 23 2015, 19:19:21) 

[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 7.0.0 (clang-700.0.59.5)] on darwin

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> import os

>>> your_variable  = os.environ.get('YOUR_VARIABLE', None)


>>> print your_variable
token123

I’ve used this to display current release in my python application(You need to generate a special API token and add it to config variables)

os.popen('curl -n https://api.heroku.com/apps/open-event/releases -H 
"Authorization: Bearer ' + token + '" -H 
"Accept: application/vnd.heroku+json; version=3"').read()

Easy to monitor

If something is wrong with your APP you need to use this command

$ heroku logs

it shows all logs

To see 10 latest releases use:

$ heroku releases

How you can set up Open Event to deploy to heroku?

  1. Clone https://github.com/fossasia/open-event-orga-server
  2. Go to directory of open event orga server(/open-event-orga-server)
  3. Add git remote 
     heroku git:remote -a open-event
  4. You can check if open event is added to git remote 
    $ git remote -v
heroku https://git.heroku.com/open-event.git (fetch)
heroku https://git.heroku.com/open-event.git (push)
origin https://github.com/fossasia/open-event-orga-server.git (fetch)
origin https://github.com/fossasia/open-event-orga-server.git (push)
  5. Now you can deploy changes to open-event application(You need a permissions 🙂 )

Why should you use a Heroku?

It’s great to deploy apps because you are able to share content in short time what I’ve done. Besides it’s very well documented so you can find there answers for most of your questions. Finally most of things you can configure using Heroku dashboard so it’s the best advantages of this tool.

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Open Event: Planning the Scheduler UI

{ Repost from my personal blog @ https://blog.codezero.xyz/planning-the-scheduler-ui/ }

In the first phase of the GSoC coding period, Saptak Sengupta and myself have been working on the Scheduler UI.

The Scheduler UI would allow the organizers to graphically schedule/manage the sessions in their conference/event.

Event-Organizer by Josh Greco has been a major inspiration for the timeline design. The css styles have been borrowed from that project.

After some research, we have decided to use the interact.js javascript library for implementing drag-drop and resizing functionality to the project and lodash for array/collection manipulations and for some useful utility functions.

The following tasks have been formulated:

  • Drag-and-drop interface to add session blocks into a timeline ✓
  • Resize sessions to change time ✓
  • load live data from the server using the API ✓
  • Handle session clashes within a track properly ✓
  • Add Track button that opens up a modal to add a track. ✓
  • Search option for unscheduled sessions ✓
  • Save each session change/update using the API
  • Option to Export timeline as pdf
  • Option to export timeline/calendar as iCal

An umbrella issue (#349) has been created in the open-event-orga-serverrespository to track the progress. There will be a separate issue created for each task when that task is being worked upon and the same would be referred to in the umbrella issue.

We are targeting GSOC 2016: Milestone 4 (Due by June 12, 2016) to finish the Scheduler UI and we are confident that we’ll be able to reach our target. *fingers-crossed* :sweat_smile:

To know more about the Scheduler UI, read Enhancing the Open Event Server: Scheduler UI.

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79 issues done in one week!

Have you ever wondered how to achieve such a result?

Screen Shot 2016-05-31 at 12.09.51I couldn’t believe that we’ve solved such many issues in Milestone 2. The 79 is 34% of all issues, isn’t it amazing? I think that defining what kind of project do we want to develop and what features should it have allows us to move quickly and cooperate with the whole team very effectively.

What you need to achieve similar score?

First of all, you need to prepare good document which help a whole team to get familiar with the project and its features. The most important part is to describe very precisely step by step a project flow, and features required to implement. It can help us to avoid obstacles, tie-ups and questions related to flow, because every developer is able to go through the document and find a desired answer.

Secondly, you need to define a target what are we going to achieve and when. Based on this info developers can define plan of work easily. We have divided 3 month period into 15 milestones. In each end of milestone we talk what we have achieved, what has been done, what hasn’t been done and what are we going to do in next week.

Daily, also works well in our team, because we are able to monitor what is currently happening in project. And you can quickly help if someone has a problem.

Flow of solving issues is very simple(Justin configured a CI). We have two branches – master and testing. Writing tests is essential to do before writing code. If tests are ready and passed successfully we can create a pull request. Then other developers review our code and finally if everything is ok we can merge changes with testing branch.

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Enhancing the Open Event Server: Scheduler UI

{ Repost from my personal blog @ https://blog.codezero.xyz/enhancing-open-event-scheduler-one/ }

The community bonding period went pretty well. Worked on the OpenTechSummit 2016‘s website. Fixed a few issues. Got to know the team. :smile:

Now comes the coding period which started yesterday (23rd May 2016).
In the first phase, I (Niranjan Rajendran) will be primarily working on creating a Scheduler tool for each event. Saptak Sengupta and myself will be working on this.

The Scheduler would allow the organizers to graphically schedule/manage the sessions in their conference/event. The proposed features for the Scheduler are:

  1. Drag-and-drop sessions into tracks on a timeline.
  2. Change the timings of the sessions by resizing the sessions’ element on the timeline.
  3. Create a new event by dragging a time period on the timeline.
  4. Create new tracks.
  5. Switch between timelines of the different days of the event.
  6. Load existing sessions from the database into the timeline.
  7. Print the timeline or convert it into a PDF file.
  8. Export the schedule in different formats such as iCalendar.

The scheduler UI would not be practical on small screens (Mobile phones) and would be hard to use. So, we will be thinking of some alternative – a simpler interface for smaller screens.

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How to create simply posts website in Flask framework?

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I have used Django framework so far, but because of my participation in Google summer of code. We decided to use something new. It was Flask. And Now I want to share it with you.

It is a microframework, which allows us in really short time create a nice app. I’d like to share my experience in this area to teach you how you can create an app. You will have a possibility to add, delete and update posts.

First of all you need to install flask framework via pip in your command line:

pip install flask

Next step it will be prepare a files structures
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My structure of files looks:

  • forms( will contain all form objects in our case only post form)
  • templates will contain all app views(listing posts and possibility to create post)

We want to manage posts, so we have to define database model Post in app.py. I only defined title and text fields. Zrzut ekranu 2015-06-28 o 00.49.04

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Next step will be create a routes. The main purpose of routes is to recognize urls and execute actions. We need four methods to display list of posts(index), delete post(delete_post), add post(new_post) and update post(edit_post)

That’s all to run your first posts application. Additionally I attach link to project on github, where you can trace whole project code.

Have a nice coding!

Continue ReadingHow to create simply posts website in Flask framework?