I didn’t want Trump to win the election. Just wanted Hilary Clinton to lose. She been in duty for so long. What has she achieved? Well, lots of death in the middle east countries.
Trump might have used a very unconventional campaign but I think he did whatever in his power to get heard. I hope he will now make peace with all countries in the world most importantly Russia. He’s stance towards China might be a bit harsh but what can he do? He wants to compete with them in terms of manufacturing. Not nuke them up.
I reach home from work when it’s already dark. I got to park my car in front of my house. I said to myself wouldn’t it be awesome if I could light up the house exterior light using my mobile phone? I bought some WiFI enabled switches from the internet and installed it. Here’s a diagram of the installation.
‘All iz well’ except for 1 problem. Nayar’s highness has stop his car, unlock his phone, launch an app, press the LIGHT ON button, then reverse his car. Nayar is not happy!!!
So I had to make a system such that whenever Nayar reaches home, the exterior lights up automatically? Makes sense right? How did I achieve this? Simple but not so simple.
The Wireless Switch was vendor locked in; meaning it works with their cloud service and Android/iOS app. It doesn’t give me the flexibility for I need. Had to do the following steps in order to be free:
Flash an Arduino firmware (from github) to the wireless switch.
Create a home automation server on a raspberry pi (which I dropped in favour of cloud hosting)
Create an Android app which whenever I connect to my home WiFi, I sends the TURN ON lights on
After lots of research and development, trial and error, it finally worked 😀
Is it over? Nope. Who’s gonna turn off the lights when I enter home? Ofcourse I put a 3 minutes timer in it 😛
And the Laziest Award 2016 goes to?
Coming soon. Very soon:
Control garage doors (R&D stage)
Temperature and humidity sensors (prototype stage)
Get status of windows/doors status: open or closed (R&D stage)
Home Camera Surveillance (waiting for materials)
Smart TVs integration (prototype stage)
Solar Water Tank monitoring and control inflows (R&D stage)
Wanna get into the world of Home Automation too? Wanna turn on your coffee machine from your bed and more? Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn,Facebook or Twitter.
After logging in through the usual Internet Banking link, I was asked to choose a new password after which I was in the new web interface.
It definitely looks better than the previous interface which had a long long menu bar. It feels very light and minimalist.
However I am still facing a hard time accessing my Prepaid Card dashboard that is still dependent on flash; meaning it can’t be used on Macs and Linux unless you have flash plugin installed.
Umar presented some of the “best practices” in the CSS universe; some of which stirred some religious debate e.g. the usage of 2 spaces vs Tabs for indentation. Yusuf, a backend PHP developer, pointed out that in the PHP community, the latter have coding standards known as PSR (PHP Standards Recommendations) which is widely accepted. CSS does not have such widely accepted standards. However attempts are being made have to formalize the standards as David mentioned. I forgot the github name of the project.
Anyways, I am of the opinion that if you are following a coding standard, try to stick to it after deciding on which standards you and your team are going to use.
Another point which I remember is to NOT use CSS #Id Selectors and it makes total sense. The reason is pretty simple to me. Good programmers write code in order to cater for most scenarios. Ids can be used only once on a page. Let’s take for example a “single post page” in a blog. You know very well that only 1 post is going to be displayed on a page
Why you should opt for the second option is that when you have to write the front-end for search page etc, you can just use the class .post without problems as many articles can appear. But during the meetup, maybe I should be replacing the post id using -data* stuffs. Gotta read more on this.
What to remember here is, never ever use # in CSS unless working with form input as per what Sundeep said.
“Vue.js Jumpstart”
Humeira introduced us about Vue.js. I used it previously. Simply love the simplicity and the level of laziness it allows developers to have. However Vue.js is a relatively new technology and I guess it’s pretty normal for big corporations to not use it in production at the moment. As time goes by, I hope Vue.js really takes off in terms of popularity thus gaining stability.
Vue.js, to me, is awesome because it allows me to concentrate on the logic of data objects in JavaScript and I don’t have to care about the UI views. I know it would simply update itself to reflect the state of my JavaScript object. I just love declarative type UIs.
“Le futur, c’est maintenant avec CSS4”
David explained the differences between a CSS preprocessor and CSS postprocessor. Maybe I might not have yet fully grasped the differences right now but from what I can understood, preprocessors convert .sass or .less to .css. Postprocessors take plain .css augmented with new unsupported attributes by browsers and compiles it into plain .css which are supported by most browsers. Anyways, I think this topic is too advanced for me right now.
Conclusion
Photo stolen from David
Much more happened at the meetup but this writeup is all about what struck me personally. I’d recommend you to attend future meetups so as to be able take part in the interesting debates and be up-to-date with latest front-end techs 😉
