Alicia Sykes's Blog

Apps World 2014 in London was great this year, with over 1,600 attendees it was held at the ExCel, and had loads of good speakers and sponsors.

My favourite talks from day 2 were: first a talk titled responsive website or native app which was given by Geoff Parkhurst who's the CTO of Lovehoney, he weighed up the advantages and disadvantages of each side very nicely. This I found particularly interesting since it's relevant to work at the moment.

Another great talk was given by Grant Allen from Google, on extreme wearables. This image (sorry for the bad quality photo) actually shows something really cool. the axis on the left is the % of people who are awake, the axis on the bottom is the time of night. As you can see, between 10pm and 1am, the % of people awake falls, since they've gone to bed, however at 3:30 AM, it suddenly rises, this was due to a huge earth quake that night. Each different coloured line is a different city, and this data could potentially be used to give a short warning to an earth quake to people in further away cities. This particular data came from JawBone, but any basic activity tracker would have recorded similar results, and would have the scope to implement this.

I also attended several other very interesting talks seen  here

Introduction

Any student will know that mobile phones are a massive distraction to studying, but also have some utilities that help you get your work done, such as calculator or Wikipedia. This weekend I developed an application that aims to reduce the distractions cause by your Android device.

The interface is simple, you enter the amount of time you need to stay focused for, and press start. Study mode will mute all notifications and disable home and back buttons. It's not immediately easy to get out of the app once your in study mode, though you do still have access to core features such as emergency dialer, time...  Once the timer reaches zero you once again have full access to your phone.

Technical Details

Links

Screen Shots

Start Screen

Timer Screen

Additional Views

Droidcon London is a 2-day Android conference organised by Skills Matter. 

The first day was a community-led barcamp and democamp with talks and discussions given by opensource Android developers. The second day was packed full of presentations given by the worlds leading Android experts, on a range of Android topics. There were 1,200 attendees and loads of great sponsors, as well as an open bar party in the evening and a hackathon the following weekend.

Sponsors

There was also a wide range of sponsors including Microsoft Azure, Sony, PayPal/ Braintree, Intel, Epson, AppConverter, Amazon App Store, Facebook, Badoo, ooVoo and Google Developers. As well as many other Bronze sponsors. Attendees were free to talk to the sponsors about their software, products and services and ask questions (and get a ton of free t-shirts and stash!).

The Presentations

The Party

Setting Up

A few photos

Chet Haase - Practicing Practical Best Practices for Software Development Practitioners

Cyril Mottier - Android Wear

 

The Oxford half marathon is a 13.1 mile flat run though Oxford city, including Iffley Road, Cowely, the Mini Plant, the River Thames + Canal Path and this year the Iffley running track and a "Banister Mile" which was separately timed.

the start

A not so great photo of me coming into the finish

Map of the route, tracked using Runtastic

I tracked my run (as always) with Runtastic, by far my favourite sports tracking app. Below is a link the the session, also the map below is from the same session.
https://www.runtastic.com/en/users/Alicia-Sykes/sport-sessions/331596587

BattleHack is an annual world wide hackathon run by PayPal. This year I was lucky enough to once again get a ticket to the London event, which took place on the weekend of the 11th - 12th October 2014, at Level 39, Canary Wharf. Level 39 as always an amazing venue with a 360 degree panoramic view of London and Canary Wharf.



As with previous years the food was of course really good, and plenty of it, full breakfast, fish and chips for lunch, fare ground style snacks at tea, then hot dogs and PayPal fairy cakes and beer for dinner, and pizza for midnight snack - and that was just Saturdays meals!

The first few hours consisted of networking, opening talks and sponsor pitches. The sponsor talks were really good, and included SendGrid, Twillio, Nango, Relayr, context.io, JustGiving and NFC Ring. There was also an opportunity afterwards to talk to the sponsors and get help and information about using their products (and free t shirts and stickers!).

I was also very happy, since I won a Leap Motion Controller without even having to do that much! Thanks PayPal! It is a pretty cool piece of tech, so I will create a blog post reviewing it a bit later today.

Unfortunately I was unable to stay for the whole weekend (since I was running in a half marathon on Sunday morning) but I spent Saturday hacking into the early hours, and watched the presentations of the other hackers online after the event had finished. Some very cool stuff was created during BattleHack London 2014

:)


 



 























First prize included winning an axe! How cool!?

View from the starting line

Palace to Palace was a charity cycle ride in aid of the Princes Trust and sponsored by Saudi Arabia, it's an annual event which took place on the 5th of October 2014 this year. The standard ride was a scenic 45 mile (72km) route from Buckingham Palace to Windsor Castle, including Westminster, Richmond, alot of countryside and small villages and finishing at Windsor.There was also an Ultra ride, which was 90 miles and had he same starting and finishing points.

The event was very well organised, with the whole route fully marshalled, optional chip timing, and a free lunch and goodie bag at the end :) We were very lucky with the weather, apart from a cold start, the rest of the day was cool, sunny and clear with dry roads, near perfect cycling conditions.

The Accenture Classic Team

Me and a friend from work road cycled as part of team Accenture, along with 200+ other Accenture employees, who together raised over £42,000 or the Princes Trust.


All in all a very fun Sunday raising money for a good cause :)

Motion - Houses of parliament across the Thames

Dancing Lamas :)

Increased contrast highlighting the architecture of the cathedral

Frinton and Walton Yacht Club

Millenium Bridge - Newcastle

Canal Path - Whiltshire

Tower Bridge - London

Snow Effect

Auto Smiles (not that we needed that) - Pirbright Camp

Oxford Half Marathon 13 - (that's me in the white and pink top)

Panorama of London - Canary Wharf

Panorama - Tryfan, Whales

Action - little brothers homemade go-kart

Motion - water