Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Stoic - Turn spreadsheet into mobile apps

I went to Stoic meetup in Singapore and learnt quite a lot from this amazing product.

Their concept of turning spreadsheet data into usable "apps" seems neat. Everyone wish to turn  rows and columns of data into something more meaningful. Stoic aims to do that.

my sketch of their product
Stoic generalise the data, and then let you view them from different perspectives. You can then easily integrate their map/grid/etc widgets into your website.

For example, they built a Q&A app using their Stoic platform! All with just 300 lines of code.

But that wasn't all.

I was most amaze at their approach and technology.

Firstly, they like JavaScript a lot. They use great frameworks - node, angular and stuff. Then when there isn't a library that they need, they engineered it! Hence they released formula.js, parseq.js and jsDoc.

And they are never shy to talk about their culture and the tools they use.

When an audience asked about they funding and if they would still be around in the future, this was what Ismael (roughly) said:
We are not worried. We are in our mid-40s. We have wife, kids and mortgage, but we are financially very stable. We can go on for years without earning revenues. No problem.
That's some attitude.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Developer Outreach and their Benefits

While reading some whitepaper from ChallengePost on "how to organise developer contest", I came across this matrix on the various developer program components and their benefits.

For example, your developer portal and blog is mainly for reaching out to your existing developers, less on reaching out to new developers. 


Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Monday, February 4, 2013

An App for Hosting Hackathons

If you are organizing an hackathon, you could use hackathon.io to create and manage the event.

It covers common activities such as:

  • Invite participants
  • Invite sponsors
  • Invite judge
  • Create schedule
  • Write rules
  • Feed for event
  • Judging tools (vote)