How much do you need to eat pizza to create a service for students
As a student, you often encounter the problem of quickly obtaining relevant information from classmates and teachers. For example, postponement of classes, requests to bring documents to the dean's office, unexpected execution of examinations, and so on. Often, obtaining important information even after an hour can be critical, for example, if the teacher began to set off tests for free, and you did not have time, because you found out about it late.
We created Edusty - a service that solves this problem.
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We encountered this problem when we were still students. We had a group in a social network where our classmates published various information and materials on studies. To keep abreast of the latest news of the group, you had to constantly go there, because you never know when new information may appear. In reality, of course, no one sat and refreshed the page every 5 minutes, in connection with which there were often instances of coming to a couple which was canceled and other unpleasant consequences.
Enrolling in the magistracy, we were faced with the question of choosing the topics of master's theses. It so happened that three people from our group appealed to one teacher with a request to become a supervisor, to which he proposed the idea of an educational service, which could be divided into three master's theses. A lucky coincidence was that we could implement the service on three mobile platforms at once without searching for third-party developers, since each of us was able to develop a bit for this or that operating system (iOS, Android, Windows / Windows Phone), and also that Our supervisor has set up an office for us for free. The only problem was the lack of nearby cafes or other places where you can satisfy your hunger. We made an important decision for us - order pizza over the Internet. After we found a good pizzeria, nothing more prevented us from developing the service.
The initial idea was far from the final result, it was assumed that the service would include electronic courses, interactive class schedules, attendance and progress logs, tests, etc. In the course of studying in the magistracy, it turned out that our topics are not enough for scientific research, so the topics had to be changed to others, only remotely related to the service. However, the service itself was not abandoned and was brought to the stage of closed beta testing for a group of students at our university. According to its results, it turned out that due to the abundance of service functions, each of which was not perfected and thought through to the end, it was difficult to use the service. Therefore, we decided to revise the concept of service, start its development from scratch and focus on one function - instant notification of students about events in a group. The start of the new project was given on July 22, 2014, after defending the master’s theses, in connection with which we were able to devote the project 5 days a week (by this time, 59 pizzas had already been eaten) . About a month and a half later, the Edusty application was already available in four app stores: the App Store, Google Play, the Windows Store, the Windows Phone Store.
The service is a platform for student notifications. It works very simple - log in through a social network, choose a university and a group. After that, you can write a message or send a photo and all your classmates (who chose the same group) will instantly receive a push notification on any modern device: a smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC.
Initially, it was thought that in the application it will be possible to log in only through an account of one of the social networks (VK, Facebook, Odnoklassniki, Google+). We did not plan to register through the internal account, as this additionally burdens the user by remembering the username and password, and us by writing a lot of extra code (a lot of extra pizzas eaten) and responsibility for storing personal data. When the application was ready, we sent it to all 4 stores for certification and publication.
The Android version was without any questions during the day, but like the Windows Phone version.
With the Windows Store version had to tinker a little longer. To test the application, we created a VK account and attached a login and password for it to the testers team of each store. However, due to the fact that the Windows Phone testers team was located in Russia, and the Windows Store team in the USA, the account was temporarily blocked for reasons of VK security policy features. However, after unlocking and resubmitting for certification, there were no problems.
The most interesting was waiting for us when publishing in the App Store. After 10 days, the publication was denied. Since the application had the ability to authorize only through social networks and we didn’t use any other functionality of these networks, the team of testers considered that we are forcing the user to give their personal data
and it was suggested to create your own authorization. Understanding that we cannot use any other social networking functionality now, we decided to make the possibility of authorization through the internal account of the service.
As a result, the service cost us 102 eaten pizza totaling $ 435. The advance discount card was a strategic decision.
In the future, we will talk about how our service works, how we tested it on living people and what problems arose.
We created Edusty - a service that solves this problem.
')
A bit of history
We encountered this problem when we were still students. We had a group in a social network where our classmates published various information and materials on studies. To keep abreast of the latest news of the group, you had to constantly go there, because you never know when new information may appear. In reality, of course, no one sat and refreshed the page every 5 minutes, in connection with which there were often instances of coming to a couple which was canceled and other unpleasant consequences.
Enrolling in the magistracy, we were faced with the question of choosing the topics of master's theses. It so happened that three people from our group appealed to one teacher with a request to become a supervisor, to which he proposed the idea of an educational service, which could be divided into three master's theses. A lucky coincidence was that we could implement the service on three mobile platforms at once without searching for third-party developers, since each of us was able to develop a bit for this or that operating system (iOS, Android, Windows / Windows Phone), and also that Our supervisor has set up an office for us for free. The only problem was the lack of nearby cafes or other places where you can satisfy your hunger. We made an important decision for us - order pizza over the Internet. After we found a good pizzeria, nothing more prevented us from developing the service.
The initial idea was far from the final result, it was assumed that the service would include electronic courses, interactive class schedules, attendance and progress logs, tests, etc. In the course of studying in the magistracy, it turned out that our topics are not enough for scientific research, so the topics had to be changed to others, only remotely related to the service. However, the service itself was not abandoned and was brought to the stage of closed beta testing for a group of students at our university. According to its results, it turned out that due to the abundance of service functions, each of which was not perfected and thought through to the end, it was difficult to use the service. Therefore, we decided to revise the concept of service, start its development from scratch and focus on one function - instant notification of students about events in a group. The start of the new project was given on July 22, 2014, after defending the master’s theses, in connection with which we were able to devote the project 5 days a week (by this time, 59 pizzas had already been eaten) . About a month and a half later, the Edusty application was already available in four app stores: the App Store, Google Play, the Windows Store, the Windows Phone Store.
About service
The service is a platform for student notifications. It works very simple - log in through a social network, choose a university and a group. After that, you can write a message or send a photo and all your classmates (who chose the same group) will instantly receive a push notification on any modern device: a smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC.
Problems with the publication
Initially, it was thought that in the application it will be possible to log in only through an account of one of the social networks (VK, Facebook, Odnoklassniki, Google+). We did not plan to register through the internal account, as this additionally burdens the user by remembering the username and password, and us by writing a lot of extra code (a lot of extra pizzas eaten) and responsibility for storing personal data. When the application was ready, we sent it to all 4 stores for certification and publication.
The Android version was without any questions during the day, but like the Windows Phone version.
With the Windows Store version had to tinker a little longer. To test the application, we created a VK account and attached a login and password for it to the testers team of each store. However, due to the fact that the Windows Phone testers team was located in Russia, and the Windows Store team in the USA, the account was temporarily blocked for reasons of VK security policy features. However, after unlocking and resubmitting for certification, there were no problems.
The most interesting was waiting for us when publishing in the App Store. After 10 days, the publication was denied. Since the application had the ability to authorize only through social networks and we didn’t use any other functionality of these networks, the team of testers considered that we are forcing the user to give their personal data
and it was suggested to create your own authorization. Understanding that we cannot use any other social networking functionality now, we decided to make the possibility of authorization through the internal account of the service.Conclusion
As a result, the service cost us 102 eaten pizza totaling $ 435. The advance discount card was a strategic decision.
In the future, we will talk about how our service works, how we tested it on living people and what problems arose.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/241628/
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