Frederick Louie Ba-a
Programmer, Caresharing
(Wakulu.com)
- Drixx
Fred started with Caresharing as part of the CodrSchool internship program. After the internship, he continued to work on Wakulu while finishing his bachelor's degree in computer science.
Fred is one of Wakulu's pioneer coders, and the so-called poster boy. He works on the front end of Wakulu (such as Profile page, membership, events/reminders, and goals features, and more to come).
Fred is a Java/ C/ Ruby programmer, a rookie DOTA player, and an aspiring photographer.
Q: First things first, how did you end up being a programmer?Fred: I never actually planned this ever in my life. I was stuck from choosing what course to take during college, and my only options were Accountancy, Nursing, or Computer Science. The former 2 choices were so mainstream to me, especially that most of my highschool classmates were taking those courses, so I chose to be unique and took CompSci. That's how it started.
Q: How did you juggle university and your programming work -- not to mention your social life?
Fred: It was difficult but okay. Honestly, I never really thought that programming would be this hard and challenging. Not to mention, I also had to pass minor subjects. I was a dean's lister so I also needed to maintain good grades. It was tiring, but I never complained. I still managed to socialize, hangout with friends and watched movies, and have a girlfriend. That's the essence of being a student, and I embraced it. :)
Q: Being a newbie, do you see yourself programming for a long time?
Fred: Yeah, I guess. I mean I love programming. The cool part of it is I get to learn something new everyday. I'm like a juggernaut when coding. hahaha! I think it's one of those things that keeps me alive everyday. So I guess I can see myself still programming even until 10-20 years from now. :)Q. What programming language(s) you would choose to master, and why?
Fred: C, Java and Ruby. C because I think it's the most basic and it's the foundation of all programming languages (structured or object-oriented), and the language is still really powerful. Java because it's the only object oriented language that has been used in most desktop and mobile applications (the future of programming). And of course, Ruby (on Rails) because of its consistent approach of building web applications in an out-of-the-box architecture, and its pragmatic convention-over-configuration philosophy that makes coding a lot easier.
Q: Let's now talk about Wakulu. From a developer's point of view, can you please tell us the original idea, and how it evolved to Wakulu?
Fred: It was first named "TwitterForHealth", dedicated to medical coaches (usually retired doctors/psychiatrist/psychologist/etc.) who want to provide coaching online. It was more like Twitter, only that the communication was between a coach and his members, and that the coach can share resources (books, and videos) to his/her members for better interaction. After that, we realized that we can also cater to users not only limited to the medical field, but also to other coaches who want to share their knowledge on other fields (cooking, photography, music, sports, etc.). We then considered a bigger scope for our application, made some revisions and added some features to cater to more coaching program categories. We renamed the app to "Wakulu" which an African term for "group dance", and now an application dedicated to provide tools for on-line coaching.Q: Can you describe to us how were the early days of Wakulu?
Fred: Wakulu was really simple during its early days. The main group page has a timeline for coach and members messages where they can ask the coach and the coach answers them and a resources feature where the coach can add files or share a Youtube video for his/her members. Since it was only made by newbies of Ruby on Rails (4 of us interns), we focused on these areas because these are also the most important features for coach-to-coachee iteraction. After seeing the potential of the application, it was taken to a higher level, we have then a senior programmer (Mr. Norlan) who joined us and led us in the development and refactoring of the app (he was also my mentor in RoR). At that time then Wakulu was buffed with more features to provide better interaction between users.
Q: What were your struggles back then? And, how did you and the rest of the team cope up?
Fred: Basically the struggle we experienced in the development of the app was when we took for granted the workflow of the app. It was okay to have features added but it made the workflow kind of fuzzy in the long run. And we didn't see that because we didn't have real users back then to comment on our work. When we finally have testers to try out our app, their first comment is the workflow, and basically we missed to emphasize that, when we were busy adding new features and not thinking what it might do to the workflow. So what we did is we halted on adding new features and redefined the workflow to make it very clear to users. I think the app will be totally useless if the users cannot even grasp how to use it.
Q: On the positive side, what are the fun surprises that you get out from developing Wakulu?
Fred: I LEARNED A LOT! I learned many things about Ruby on Rails (RoR), jQuery, Ajax, javascript, css, Twitter and Facebook. I learn something new almost everyday coding this app. I'm still a newbie at RoR but it didn't stop me to be hopeful in developing this app. I am so thankful that I was able to continue doing Wakulu. And now Wakulu still gives me a lot of surprises.
Q: Having Wakulu as somewhat the first software application product you 'seriously' worked on, what is your dream application that you want to develop?
Fred: A mobile application since it's the in thing today (android apps specifically). And I also want to venture into developing more web applications but I'm still brainstorming on what to work on. :)
To know more about the other side of a programmer's life (if there is/are), you can check his Information Overflow blog site.
- The other side of a programmer -- drixx
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