Mariusz Nowostawski from dothinger team was talking at CodeCraft about his two summer projects: TabacooFree and DoThinger.

1. CodeCraft meeting
May 2012
Mariusz Nowostawski
@praeteritio

2. About myself
• Lecturer
– Information science: telecommunications, AI,
programming (software engineering), security,
network administration, design, multi-agent systems
• Scientist
– Virtual machines and machine learning, evolutionary
computing, self-evolving software, mobile and
ubiquitous technologies, modeling life
• Adventurer and others…
– Running, mountain climbing, cycling, paragliding, etc.

5. Today’s talk
Summer project 1
applied research
Summer project 2
scaffolding for doing things

6. A: How many?
B: How many what?
A: How many people smoked in cars?
B: 3. There 78 cars and only 3 had smokers.
A: Any children in the cars?
B: No. There were no children.
A: That’s good.

7. A: How many?
B: How many what?
A: How many people smoke in cars?
B: 3. There 78 cars and only 3 had smokers.
A: Any children in those cars?
B: No. There were no children.
A: That’s good.
(pause)
A: Why do people smoke?

8. Person A

9. A: How many?
B: How many what?
A: How many people smoke in cars?
B: 3. There 78 cars and only 3 had smokers.
A: Any children in those cars?
B: No. There were no children.
A: That’s good.
(pause)
A: Why do people smoke?

10. Smoking debate
How many people
smoke in cars?

11. Approx. 16,000 cars checked
one city, 4 locations
2 weeks, 4 data collectors
fixed protocol
2.0 – 6.4 % of smokers
(depending on the area)

12. Crowdsourcing

13. • Wikipedia
• Community based designs: threadless.com
www.local-motors.com (The Forge)
• Community based voting: iStockPhotos
• www.microtask.com – paper form transcribing
• …
• reCAPTCHA. Stop spam. Read books.
• Voice-to-Text (cloud-based, like Google)
• …

14. Counting smoking in
cars
(summer project 1)

15. GLOBALink
• Vimal (Wellington)
• Hamish (Otago)
• mid-October, kickstart
• 3 skype meetings, drafting project specs
• GIT repository, initial prototyping
• Work on Android application continues…

18. TobaccoFree
• December – Androd App ready
• January – web app ready, primitive and buggy
• Mid February, initial “launch”
• Working on iOS version in spare time
• Localization
• Bug fixing, new functionality, protocol

19. Summer Project
Source Line of Code:
2136 Android Java
1205 iOSObjC
1181 Web Python
Totals grouped by language:
Java: 2136 (47.24%)
ObjC: 1205 (26.65%)
Python: 1181 (26.12%)

20. TobaccoFree.nzdis.org

22. “Big” software project
• Various software engineering skills
• Project management skills
• UI design, interaction design, specs/analysis
• Deployment and Testing
• Database skills (no-SQL, mongoDB backend)
• Java & Android programming
• Web apps, RESTful APIs, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
• Google Maps integration

23. Lessons learned
• Full stack vs. Glue frameworks
• No-SQL: the good and the bad
• Frameworks integration
• Multi-source-language development, 3 core
languages, plus JavaScript.
• Localisation, coordination, updates
• Testing, bug fixing, growing codebase,
managing complexity

24. “Big” software project
on $5k budget
Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 4,522
Development Effort Estimate:
Person-Months: 11.70
Schedule Estimate, months: 6.37
Estimated Average Number of Developers = 1.84
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 131,746
(assuming average salary = $56,286/year)

25. Deployment and Testing
• Public key cryptography, certificates
• Publishing, setups, procedures
• Bureaucracy, administrative tasks
(considerable)
• Funding: grant applications

26. Myths
“Oh, that’s easy. I can hack it in a week.”
“We just hire a programmer and it all will be
done in no time.”
“Students will help. Students can do that.”

27. Further research
• Crowdsourcing: incentives, management
• TobaccoFree: smoke counting, models, stats
• Software engineering and curriculum rethink
• People will help to collect data

28. Students and participants
• Larger participation? Incentives would help?
• Is building up skills an incentive enough?
• Skills. Tasks scope.
• Vertical vs. Horizontal specialization.

29. Summer project 2

30. Startups
• Topic for another talk
– World 45, private consulting (praeteritio)
– Ngarua
• Tomek (Wroclaw, Poland)
• Murad (Helsinki, Finland)

31. Lapland

33. Motivation
• System for active lifestyle. example: new place,
holidays
• Social networks. Actually, open social networks.
example: email
• Innovation, agility, progress. imagine that
• Research data. example: personal Science Lab
• People behavioral data FOR PEOPLE (not for sale)
Why people do what the do?

34. We need to start somewhere
• Active lifestyle.
• Open and transparent.

35. do thinger
• Doing things with friends vs.
• Doing things with anybody vs.
• Doing things on your own
• A “different” social/non-social network

36. dothinger.com

37. Things

38. Threads

39. What have I done last week?
go and check on DoThinger

40. doThinger
• We do not know yet where it is going
– Tell us: you can and you should
• Event’s/trips photo sharing – Tomek
Doing something fun, learning, exploring things
Dunedin deserves it’s own Social Networking site

41. Thank You
Questions?
Discussion, feedback, comments welcome
@praeteritio
mariusz@ngarua.com