🇬🇧British Expat 🇨🇦Vancouver ❤ Gardening 💰Founder of gitSQL

Tag: Mobile

teaching

Teaching

I wanted to get into teaching and found work at VanArts – a stones throw away from my day job.

I asked my manager if I could take up teaching 3 hours per week to support my personal development as Lead Engineering @ PAI Health.

My manager said yes, so long as I keep up with my commitments. #bestbossever!

12 weeks later I finished the course and learned A LOT about myself.

Things I had to work on

Talking too fast

Students gave me feedback early on that I talked too fast. This was a combination of being British born and excitable! To remedy this I learned how to break down my lectures and pause more often. Adding photos/discussion points/memes into the slide deck also gave me cue to pause for interaction.

When I learned to ride a motorcycle, I was told about a concept called brain fart! – Around 20 minutes of focussed riding can result in the brain disengaging for a brief period.

I was taught to vary speed, posture, position to mitigate a brain fart at high speed!

Focus capacity

Talking too quietly

My students told me that It was really easy to hear me close up during tutorial work but during the lectures my voice would quiet at times. I was softly spoken. I had to watch youtube videos and then practice how to project my voice, vary tone and use simpler vocabulary (To cater for the diversity of the student group). Some students were english second language.

Things I excelled at

Story telling (Context and real world use cases)

My students told me that they understood what they were learning and more importantly – how they could use their learnings in real scenarios for real projects. 20+ years in industry of war stories really helped here.

Teaching back

I’m a strong believer that everyone has their own learning styles and capacities but the best way to validate learnings is to teach it back.

At age 15 – I read Quantum Learning by Bobbi Deporter. Renowned author and founder of super camp USA.

Quantum Learning – Bobbi Deporter

https://www.amazon.ca/Quantum-Learning-Unleashing-Genius-You/dp/0440504279

As a teenager I relearned how to learn and followed through practically throughout my professional career.

In teaching, I used the strategies in the book to get the students to teach me what they had learned.

Teach backs were varied, with showing me code/design/demo? Talking through why, what and challenges.
Self reflection on what went well and what they wanted help with.

The group teach backs also gave other students a chance to validate their own learnings through watching their peers present.

I discovered deficiencies early and filled gaps in knowledge at an individual level.

Teaching continued…

Through the love of teaching (and being asked back by VanArts) I taught Mobile App Development and Advanced Front-end Frameworks on Saturdays.

Welcomed by a new group of students; I had a chance to flex my learnings and do a better job. Overall the feedback was great, but something new came up!

Copy/paste

We had a session on React and Redux with a lot of copy and pasting of code fragments. It was something I had rehearsed myself and thought it was OK but then on the day the pace was too quick for the students.

No battle plan survives first contact…

Moltke the Elder

During the class I got the students through the material and then promised to break down redux in the next session.

I then produced a set of slides that showed all the building blocks of redux but using an insurance company as a real world example of data flow. (Prior to this I had used a todo app – which was far too trivial to conceptualize redux flow). The new material was a success!

The session was slower paced, cross referencing with what we had done practically in the previous week and interactive this time with questions and hypothetical reasoning.

During the session I asked students to explain the redux flow and in their own words between them they were able to eloquently articulate back how things work.

There were still gaps in learning which I reassured them would come in practice. There is only so much we can absorb in one sitting.

Later – all students passed with high scores on their React projects!

More Teaching?

I was offered an opportunity to teach Advanced Front-end frameworks again to a new group of students. At the time of writing this blog we were into our 2nd week.

Every session I am learning new ways of teaching not only subject matter – but more importantly;

How to become life long learners with reduced or zero imposter syndrome.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Mobile App Server

Serve Google Android and Apple iOS applications to Mobile Devices.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/mobile-app-server

The Problem

One day at the office, I noticed my QA colleague struggle to get an Apple iOS app onto their iPhone for testing.

Typically we use online services such as https://www.diawi.com/ to present us with a QR code.

We then use this to download an .ipa application onto the mobile device using a QR code reader.

Earlier that day I was generating Google Android and Apple iOS packages via a Jenkins build server.

That’s when I thought;

“Wouldn’t it be great to serve the files out locally for download?”

The solution

I was looking for an on-premise Diawi service!

I searched high and low to see if anyone had done something like this before. Nothing came close to what I needed but I did find a useful package that enabled reading of IPA and APK packages.

I used this package and set up a Expressjs  application that would serve out files on a web interface.

Serving an Apple iOS package required a secure server so I set up the application over HTTPS as default with instructions on how to set up a self certified key and certificate.

Main Features

  1. Automatically discovers new Apps on page refresh, simply add files to path.
  2. Designed for Local Intranet usage, but could be deployed to cloud.
  3. Provides package information and QR Code per app.
  4. Secured on HTTPS – Requires an SSL certificate (Self Cert or Full).

Summary

If you are looking for an in house web based file server to serve mobile applications then this could be a valid solution. The service watches a folder to check for changes, new files, deletion of files. Subsequently browsing to the website will reflect the contents of the folder being watch.

Roadmap

  1. Drag and Drop app addition of files via Web Interface.
  2. App Icons.
  3. Extended package information.

Would you like any more features?

Get in touch, I would be happy to develop this further.

Alternatively, feel free to fork/pull request enhancements into the repository.

https://github.com/anupsaund/mobile-app-server

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén