orbital « Orbital – NUS School of Computing

Posted on June 17, 2015 by orbital

Swift is a new general-purpose compiled programming language developed by Apple. Described as “Objective-C without the C”, it aims to do away with some of the legacy drawbacks of using C as a basis for a modern programming language.

We invite Orbitees and the general public to learn about this new programming language’s basic differences, through experimenting in the Swift 2 playgrounds. An introductory level of knowledge of various programming languages will be assumed. To fully benefit from the hands-on part of this workshop, you will need to have an Apple Developer account and have Xcode (beta) installed on your computer.

Note that this presentation will be a pre-recorded video due to the presenter’s overseas travel. Presented by Min, NUS Orbital Staff.

Posted on June 12, 2015 by orbital

PyCon Singapore, the premier conference on Python in Singapore, will be held at NUS next week (June 18 – 19). We are fortunate to get two free tickets to raffle off to two lucky students. Who are the lucky students? It could be you. All you need to do is to send an email to Gaoxiang (Eric) Wang (email posted in Slack) with a short message about why you should be given the free ticket. Deadline for entry submissions will be on the 15th (next Monday) More creative entries will prevail!

Each ticket is valued at S$240; with even the student tickets valued at S$80. So why not do a little bit of work to try to get yourself a free ticket?

PyCon SG is a conference about the programming language Python. It is a community effort driven by the members of the Python User Group Singapore. Grab the chance to see how Python is used in real life by others and you may apply the skills you learn in your Orbital Project.

There will be tutorials and EDU Summit happening on June 17th, while the actual conference talks will be on June 18th and 19th. For schedule details, please refer to https://pycon.sg/event/edu-summit and https://pycon.sg/schedule. For pricing details, pleaser refer to https://pycon.sg/event/pricing-information.

Posted on June 9, 2015 by orbital

Ever wondered how Google is like? Is the food that awesome? Is the work-life balance really there? Are people nice there?

In this talk, our Engineer, Yuling, will talk about her experience since joining Google last year. In addition, she will share some interesting parts of Google that she found fascinating. For example, the process of doing code reviews, the usage of protocol buffers and the release cycles. Lastly, Yuling will share some advice, which would have been very useful for her if she had known 4 years ago.

Yuling was a computer science graduate from NUS in 2014, and is currently working as a software engineer in Maps iOS team in Google Tokyo.

You must have pre-registered to attend this talk. If you did not pre-register, you might still be able to get to attend by emailing Google’s Claire Yue (address posted on Slack after the announcement).

Posted on May 31, 2015 by orbital

[Hope you had a great time with our Mission Control sessions so far! Support your Orbital alumni and learn and network with them!]

Join us for our first mission control session at Blk 71 (the startup haven next to NUS across the AYE) next Tuesday evening. We hope to host many of your who are local to SG this summer at this nice venue outside of SoC.

Savin (Orbital alumn and tutor) will be giving this beginning level tutorial / workshop, and like the other MC session will feature approximate one hour of tutorial and hands-on, followed by time on your own to work with your partners on your Orbital project.

jQuery is a concise and fast JavaScript library that can be used to simplify event handling, HTML document traversing, Ajax interactions and animation for speedy website development. jQuery simplifies the HTML’s client-side scripting, thus simplifying Web 2.0 applications development.

This introduction is open to the public and will feature a hands-on exercise using jQuery.

Presenter: Savin Varshney, NUS
Date: Wednesday, 3 Jun 2015
Time: 18.00 – 21.00

Posted on May 31, 2015 by orbital

: Photo Credits: James M @ Flickr

Dear all:

Your first Orbital hurdle is here! Please make sure to put up your project’s README and log into Skylab no later than 1 Jun 2015 11:59pm SGT, but preferably as soon as possible). N.B. – The Skylab link is available from the main Orbital website in the left nav menu. A template README and Project Log will be posted in Slack, and you should view the 2015 peer evaluation process video on YouTube if you haven’t already. This evaluation

Note that since Skylab is in beta and the registration information for Orbital is still not finalized, there will be problems with many team’s registration. Please be patient and try your best to report problems to our FYP developer through the github Issues link here:

https://github.com/nusskylab/nusskylab/issues

In the next week, you’ll also need to do the peer evaluations of your three peer teams in your evaluation group to be listed in Skylab. These evaluations are due to be submitting in Skylab no later than 8 Jun 2015 11:59pm (exactly 1 week later).

Stay in touch with your advisor and ask if you need help on Slack!

Posted on May 18, 2015 by orbital

Yeah, so you missed part of Liftoff. You’re partner had to cover for you (we heard a lot of partner trashing during Ignition…). Or you wanted to be in both the T1 and T2 tracks at the same time. Or perhaps you really really liked it (thanks!)

In any case, we have the solution for you. We have recorded some of the Orbital sessions on to YouTube for your ease of reference and need for webcast.

Just follow the link to bit.ly/nusorbital2015vids, or go to the Liftoff webpage to find it. Videos are in reverse chronological order on the playlist.

Other sessions may have notes posted to our Slack team.

Posted on May 18, 2015 by orbital

: Credits: Scott Beale @ Flickr

Your senior Cheong Jack Kuan will be giving a short tutorial and hands-on for Twitter Bootstrap — the CSS framework that is useful for giving that ™ed, clean look for most websites. A key part of Bootstrap is in its responsive design, making sites look decent on small resolutions (low res smartphones) as well as big ones (your 30″ Apple Thunderbolt Display).

This is a beginner level session — applicable to any web-based project.

The Mission Control Session will be held at SR3 (COM1 #02-12) on Wednesday 20 May; please check back with us on Slack or on G+ Hangouts for updates. If we have no problems with the recording you can try to join us on G+ Hangouts on Air, look for [NUS Orbital 2015] as the tag.

[A reminder that Mission Control sessions are optional; they are not mandatory events for Orbitees, but highly encouraged to attend if you are local to SG and NUS. The sessions will be roughly one hour long of tutorial and another free-form hour where partners are encourage to pair program on your projects and receive help from any facilitator or advisor who is around.

If you do attend an MC session (virtually or physically), you’re welcome to include your time in the project log. Homework assignments from MCs when completed can also be used as evidence for higher level of achievements (Project Gemini, Apollo 11). ]

See ya there!

Tutorial given by:
Cheong Jack Kuan
(jackkuan.cheong@u.nus.edu)

Posted on May 9, 2015 by orbital

Greetings Orbitees:

It’s now time to suit up and get ready for your Orbital adventure. Log in on Slack and be at Orbital’s first and only mandatory kickoff workshop, Liftoff, in T-1 (Monday 11 May 2015) at 0900 hours sharp.

Follow the calendar of events here: http://bit.ly/1GG2NTB. You will see some announcements in Slack, so make sure you follow them to maximize your enjoyment of this event.

Oh, yes, give your mum a hug. It’s Happy Mother’s Day!

Posted on May 7, 2015 by orbital

As you know, we’ll be having 300+ students in Orbital Liftoff, and dealing with all your peers may be a bit difficult logistically.

1) Just in case you weren’t sure, lunch is on your own. And we’re all breaking for lunch at the same time. As such you may find that that the trek back and forth from I3 to Biz / Arts canteen or other places nearby for the short, 1 hour lunch break is really too short. For those who can pack a lunch to bring, this might be a better alternative (I know I will).

2) If all of us whip out your laptop and plug them in, the building will go dark (just kidding). Bring freshly charged laptops to the venue and alternate with your partner so you both can just use one (You heard of pair programming, right? Now try paired down programming…) Power banks are good if you are using a mobile device too.

3) Wi-fi: same here. Wi-fi is know to be spotty in COM1 and last year in i3 we didn’t have any problems with Wi-fi, but if we can all be considerate and turn off the ‘net on devices that you don’t need it for, we’ll all have a better chance of trying some of the hands-on online.

Posted on May 3, 2015 by orbital

Hope your exams have gone off with a good bang! It’s time to start to look forward to Liftoff, the mandatory 2 day workshop on the 11 and 12th of May. Join your 250+ other Orbitees on our unified summer quest to learn something new and interesting for yourselves.

The venue for our workshop will be at I3, down past SoC and Biz. We’ll be in primarily in the I3 Auditorium although an alternate track may be held in the I3 Seminar Room (just next door, don’t worry; more about this later if it does materialize.

If you’re not sure how to get there, please check out the instructions here, or better yet, give a shout out on Slack.

Orbital – NUS School of Computing

Author Archives: orbital

17 Jun Mission Control #5 – Swift 2 – by Min via YouTube

A contest for free tickets to PyCon (Due Monday)!

10 Jun Mission Control #4 – Life as a Software Engineer at Google @ Google Singapore HQ — must pre-register)

3 Jun Mission Control #3 – jQuery @ Blk 71 Plug-In

Evaluation Milestone 1 – Project README and Log – Due 11:59pm 1 Jun 2014

Missed part of Liftoff? Replay / Rewind It (webcast)

20 May 2015 – Mission Control #1 – Twitter Bootstrap

T-1 (Happy Mother’s Day!)

Packed and ready to go — some hints for Liftoff

T-7 to Liftoff (Venue will be in I3 Auditorium and I3 Seminar Room)