Codebots: Build code with the help of AI

Last week, I kept up my pattern of going to random events that show up on my Eventbrite recommendation page. So I found myself at the Festive Founders Mingle and Jingle, which was hosted by Brisbane AI and included a talk by Dr Eban Escott, the founder of Codebots.

Codebots is an AI that, as the name suggests, writes code with the particular focus on "low-code".

From their website, "Codebots is on a mission to help humans team up with code-writing bots to plan, design, build and launch awesome software to the cloud. We are a Brisbane-based technology startup taking on the global giants in the billion dollars low-code industry. On the platform, 92.68% (on average) of the software’s code is written by a codebot and the remaining percentage is completed by a human. Collaborating with a codebot means quicker software delivery times, higher quality applications but most importantly, the team spends less time coding and more time creating."

Codebots is an interesting concept. I mean, Scala was developed to cut down on the number of lines of code you had to write in Java. Certainly, there is nothing fun about writing 90% of the codebase since it's pretty generic and bog standard. So this certainly has potential but it also begs the question if the recent focus on pushing students towards STEM is a good idea. The future of works is complex and codebots shows that AI will disrupt software engineering the same way it is disrupting every other industry.

For my part, I have signed up for the codebots beta. I hope I am selected because it sounds like a fun thing new skill to learn. Besides, AI co-workers do not smell.

My Startup Weekend Experience

Last weekend I took part in Brisbane's Startup Weekend 2017. I went in blind. Not only had I never attended a Startup Weekend before, but I also have never even heard of it and bought my tickets after only a cursory reading of the promotional page. The event came to my notice while the early bird ticket price was still active and I figured $60 was cheap enough for me just to go along and see what the weekend was about. I am very glad I did! Because the weekend was not only great fun, but I feel I learnt a lot about the whole Startup process and I feel more connected to the Brisbane startup scene.

I pitched Kids Exp - it got some votes but not enough!

The Weekend started Friday night when we got an introduction to the concept and asked to pitch ideas. The ideas had to be pre-prototype. It was okay if you had thought long and hard about them and even did some market research. But if you had a prototype or a minimum viable product that was already on the market, you couldn't pitch.

I pitched a modified version of the idea behind Route 17 as Kids Experience. My idea was that when you have kids, you don't have a lot of time or energy to research and plan activities to do with the kids. So even if you have a chunk of time to spend with the kids, you might just end up watching TV because you are too exhausted to think of something else. So why not make an app that helps you plan and execute activities to do with your kids, before your kids start thinking you are uncool very quickly, even if you are Batman! 

The latter was a bit of an inside joke for anyone reading the current crop of DC comics. But in retrospect, it was too much of an inside joke. Also in retrospect, the name was not great. There were something like 30 to 40 pitches, you needed something that rolled off the tongue or some other way to be memorable. If I attend another weekend and pitch again, I'll definitely pitch both an easier concept to transmit in the short time with a memorable name that sticks with you.

I still could have tried to recruit people to my idea, but I opted to join another team. One of the other ideas that struck me as good and practical was the concept of renting out your home office space. Sort of like an Airbnb for home offices. So I ended up joining Shared Space! The name was supposed to be a placeholder, but we never ended up finding another name that we liked more. So Shared Space stuck around.

Shared Space team with our first space sharer!

Shared Space Front Page

Over the weekend we first put together a Google form survey to gauge if there was a market for the idea. It turns out there was a niche for people who did experience the loneliness and isolation of working from home but were too far away from formal co-working spaces like the ones I covered in the previous post. A lot of people, it seems would appreciate a cheaper and more local option. Also, there are people who live too far from all available co-working spaces.

It was less about renting a space, and more about forming a community that would help lessen the feeling of isolation and might also help maintain focus, increasing accountability etc. However, for some people, it was about the space because either their home offices lacked amenities such as air conditioning or they just needed to go somewhere else from time to time.

Shared Space Team Making Final Pitch

I think we did good work and made a great final pitch to the judges. But we didn't place. I suspect we should have spent more time developing our business plan and also putting in some more features that helped to differentiate us from existing competitors in the space. Still, I think the idea has legs, and my team might go ahead with the concept. The lady who originally pitched the concept is sleeping on it and will decide to proceed or not soon.

For my part, I am going ahead exploring collaboration opportunities with people I met over the weekend. I had a meeting lined-up on Wednesday, but it fell through. But I have another meeting scheduled for Friday. Let's hope that goes well and I get some great collaborations coming out of the weekend.

React Native

It's almost time for the monthly meet-up of the Women Who Code group. Last month was all about React Native. I enjoyed the intro and I am looking forward to this month's topic of "Hacking your career: tips and tricks for the job market".

Meetup: App Marketing

This year, my New Year's resolution was simply to be more social because I have been very neglectful of my friends, family and industry peers. To that end, I have signed up for a number of groups on Meetup and actually attending meetups for groups I had already signed up for. One of the new meetup I joined is a monthly meetup is Brisbane iOS/Android App Marketing Meetup that aims to teach members about how to market apps. The meetup itself is new and had its first ever meeting last Wednesday.

We had two guest speakers for the first meeting and we also got a presentation from a member. It was all very instructive. For example, it never occurred to me that Facebook Ads might be the most cost effective due to how well you could customise it. Also, hearing things from the point of the view of the marketers explained a number of things I had been observing regarding online ads. I got some good tips that slotted in well with what I was already learning from studying up on SEO marketing. But I'll talk about SEO marketing on a separate post.

I would say that my apps are still a bit off before it is worth me running a paid campaign for them. But hopefully, by the time I do. I will be able to run a good targeted campaign that offers a good return on investment.

The Art of Photography: Open2Study & Harvard on Alison

I have previously written about Alison online training. Per the post, I did not much care for the platform because I felt that the courses there were simply repackaged material from elsewhere. I am not certain that the new that Harvard University has released their photography course on Alison changes my mind about the platform.

My reservation is that like the other course I found on Alison, the Harvard University course will just be repackaged set of lectures. Not something tailored for Alison itself.  I could be completely wrong and just picked the wrong courses to sample when I was trying out Alison. I mean, I found at least one course on Udemy, which is my preferred online learning platform, that was an unedited repackage of what appeared to be a one day course on Unity. If I didn't know that the vast majority of Udemy courses are created natively for Udemy, I would get the wrong impression of the platform as a whole.

However, the reason I am not keen to give Alison a second chance is that I am already doing an "The Art of Photography" course through Open2Study, which is an Australian website offering courses through the Open Universities of Australia. They have a mix of free and paid courses. The paid courses lead to recognised accreditations. I am not as interested as official accreditation. So I am doing the month long free short course. I am enjoying it, and I also feel more connected with fellow students because of the Google Plus community.

As for why I am not interested in getting official accreditation. There is the question if photography accreditation is worth paying for given that the industry is in decline. But mostly I am not looking to do photography professionally. I am more on the series hobbyist side of the spectrum. I am happy to take photos for my own amusement, shoot friends and family or personalised photo gifts, perhaps a few paid jobs through platforms like Airtasker, although a quick look at Airtasker clearly shows that photography is a field awash with professionals, nothing more than that.