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An IoT Side Project: Chima-open-door

My company’s Internet of Things (IoT) side project began when we couldn’t reset the door lock that we inherited from a previous tenant. It was one of those minor details we learned about after moving in to our new last-minute office.

Normally, people just pay for a new one. But our team was too cheap to replace the lock and no one ever wanted to get the door bell. Plus, we’re engineers and we wanted to fiddle with some hardware.

Our goal was to open the door with a phone or wearable technology. We had several options for how to approach the problem. In theory, we could use an app, an integration into another platform, or anything that could send a signal to trigger the door lock.

So far in our door lock experiment, we’ve developed solutions for a Slack integration, native iOS and Android apps, the Apple Watch, and Pebble. I’ll focus on the architecture of the mobile apps. I admit the final product is a bit over-engineered, but we just love it!
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How I built a Kubernetes cluster so my coworkers could deploy apps faster

How do you encourage your development team to build more projects without being bogged down with deployment? As a company that builds mobile and web products, it’s a priority that we create an environment where our team members focus on building rather than deploying.

But even if we have a deployment platform, we’ll still need someone to manage the administration. As engineers, anything we have to repeat, we want to automate.

What would be a secure way to give our developers access to our deployment platform?

  1. We want to allow our developers to build their own projects (perhaps personal) without needing to ask an administrator for permission or resources to deploy a new application for testing or experimenting
  2. Our developers can deploy their own application, update it, or remove it
  3. Lower barriers for trying out new things (so to speak)
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Using Tensorflow and Support Vector Machine to Create an Image Classifications Engine

pixabay ai tensorflow post

In this post, we are documenting how we used Google’s TensorFlow to build this image recognition engine. We’ve used Inception to process the images and then train an SVM classifier to recognise the object. Our aim is to build a system that helps a user with a zip puller to find a matching puller in the database. This piece will also cover how the Inception network sees the input images and assess how well the extracted features can be classified.
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How to manage your static websites with AWS S3, CloudFront, and a command line

Here’s a short list of things you shouldn’t need to worry about when setting up a static website:

  • scaling up your servers for surges in traffic
  • logging into the AWS Management Console just to upload a new index.html file
  • spending US$5 to host a single static website

I myself was sick of worrying about these things. So I learned some Go, developed a small command line tool over the weekend, and open-sourced it.

AWS S3 is an affordable option for for hosting (and free for first time users), and AWS CloudFront is good for CDN. But setting up the two is a pain.
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Software Testing World Cup 2016 Recap: 7 Critical Learnings You May have Missed

Oursky QA Team

Last week, while people were thinking about the weekend, 4 Ourskyers got together to join the Software Testing World Cup 2016 (STWC) Asia Competition,  one of the leading events for the software testing community. Testers from all over the world will team up and join the competition to train up their skills and take home the crown. Roy, Oliver, Ten and I (Joyz) come from different positions in Oursky formed a 1-day team to join this exciting opportunity. I’d like to share with you the things we learned during the 3 hours we had against the rest of the world to test a mobile app.
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