EastBanc Technologies at NSU Career Days

Hello!

We enjoyed writing about the life of our company. We hope you are also interested to read about us and our events. This time we will tell about how we prepared and participated in the Career Days, which were held at the National University of 8, 9 and 10 April. What experience have you received and what have you borne for the future?




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Prehistory

Students of the last university courses constantly come to our internship, some of them are already ready to enter adult life, they have enough experience and competencies to join the company. Our specialists at various times have taught and are now teaching at specialized faculties (FIT, MM, FF of the NSU). Therefore, EastBanc Technologies communication with students is, in principle, permanent and continuous. Including every year we participate in Career Days - an event that the University holds for its students in order to acquaint them with the labor market, relevant companies and their activities and real projects.



Career days usually take place something like this: an official-presentational part in the form of conferences and round tables, a poster session and master classes from companies.

This year Career Days lasted 3 days.

On April 8, our HR specialist Anna Vedernikova met at a round table on the interaction of NSU and employer companies with students. You can sit for a long time, and they took advantage of everything, and spent a good part of the day there.
On April 9, PR manager Lena Yusupova and HR Anya Vedernikova represented the company at the poster session: in the NSU hall stood our stand, rolap with vacancies, and we talked about our projects and company life, talked with students about their future professional activities, invited the master classes of our experts on April 10th. During the day we talked with some incredible number of guys and girls from FIT, Mekhmat, Fizfak, Ekonom.

Students

What can be said about the students? They are all the same: dreaming, youthful, naive, someone curious, someone indecisive. Mostly, of course, inexperienced and weakly representing what work and reality are. Even if these are the last courses, and there is at least some programming experience, then for what purpose and what project they wrote, what profits did the end user get from this, they have no idea. In any case, they cannot tell clearly. Our task here is to tell, show how these processes work - from the very beginning of the birth of the project to its implementation and development. Why in general and for whom we work, what our products carry and how they make business life easier, simpler and more modern. And we told. Of course, those who were interested.
Some of them came to us the next day at master classes.

Master Classes

On April 10, two master classes were held for students who were prepared with love by all of us more than one day. We met, invented all sorts of things, wrote scripts, picked up pictures, conducted rehearsals with employees as students. Laughing to tears, arguing, teasing each other, rewriting the script and changing our ideas. As a result, it turned out so interesting that even our employees, who spoke at rehearsals in the negotiations as students, learned a lot of new things and got a bunch of topics for professional discussions and disputes. Well, that is, the preparation of such events in itself is an event worthy of existence!



Just say, the people came less than we would like. Straight much less. With what it is connected, it is not clear. Whether this is a normal attendance for Career Days events, or just spring and Friday evening were on the street, but these factors turned out to be stronger than an inquisitive student. At the first master class, we had 2 students, and at the second - 8. However, they are pleased actively participated in the events, answered questions and riddles, shared their experiences and asked, asked, asked. It was interesting. After the end of the master classes (and this is the eighth hour of Friday evening, it should be noted), our experts literally squeezed in the corner and interrogated about how to work and do real cool things.



As a result, the students were rewarded not only with answers to the most tricky and witty and unexpected questions, but also with cool souvenirs - polo and sweatshirts with our symbolism.

Master class by Vadim Efanov "Ways to achieve maximum adaptability of the interface of a web application."

Vadim showed an example of an adaptive web-interface, showed its capabilities and told how to achieve the Parallax effect. On our Vkontakte page we promised to post materials for this master class. Follow the news.



At the master class, practical techniques for building an interface with an adaptive design were demonstrated.



Here are some of the techniques described:
Embedding the application interface in the size of a single screen.
The use of third-party libraries in the project.
Construction of a horizontal base layout (in the form of a slide show).
Proper connection of fonts on the site and their use in the code.
Ways to control font size.
Parallax effect.
Layout management using media queries.
Changing properties of markup blocks using CSS.
Adaptive image behavior.
Adaptive block height and vertical alignment.

Master class by Alexei Bromot, Vadim Chesnokov and Olga Crow "Recipe for a real application on a smartphone: we start to work."

The guys, right before the eyes of the amazed public, wrote and sent to the app review an iPhone mobile app that shows the weather near the NSU. Who would have thought: this application has not yet been! What the hell is not joking, maybe it will even pass a review, and we will place it in the appstore on an ongoing basis.





What did they do? Implemented by native means the simplest client-server application that sends a single request to the server. The answer is parsed and displayed on the screen. Working with the server is wrapped in a separate class. The temperature in addition to the main screen of the application is displayed in the Today Extension widget.
Service code for sending the request:

- (void)updateWeather: (void (^)(NSString *weather, NSError *error))completion { NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://weather.nsu.ru/weather_brief.xml"]; [[[NSURLSession sharedSession] dataTaskWithURL:url completionHandler:^(NSData *data, NSURLResponse *response, NSError *error) { dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{ if (!error) { NSString *resultString = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; if (completion) { completion([self parseCurrentTemperature:resultString], nil); } } else { if (completion) { completion(nil, error); } } }); }] resume]; } - (NSString *)parseCurrentTemperature: (NSString *)sourceString { NSRegularExpression *regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"<current>(.*)<\\/current>" options:0 error:NULL]; NSTextCheckingResult *result = [regex firstMatchInString:sourceString options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [sourceString length])]; NSString *weatherSubstring = [sourceString substringWithRange:[result rangeAtIndex:1]]; float floatValue = roundf(weatherSubstring.floatValue * 10.0) / 10.0; NSString *sign = @""; if (floatValue > 0) { sign = @"+"; } else if (floatValue < 0) { sign = @"-"; } NSString *resultString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@%.1f°", sign, fabsf(floatValue)]; return resultString; } 

We still had a little time, which we decided not to lose, but to collect and show ... another interesting application (it was a homemade piece). The fact is that we have a project that uses the camera of the phone to photograph and recognize small objects. This is an interesting application, but from it we took only a part of the algorithm and adapted it to recognize what is almost always at hand - coins! Our algorithm is implemented using OpenCV. Some of its stages transform the image to obtain a contrast image, the subsequent steps of the algorithm vectorize the resulting contours and define the closed boundaries of the objects. As a result, in memory we have the contours of a circle, and the image has circles filled with color. Yes, and the photos are made on a special figure. The reference picture is a practically inverted substrate with QR markers with precisely known distances between them. This is necessary to estimate the base pixel size. It remains only a little - compare the size of the coins from the site cbr.ru with the size of the contours obtained during processing, and voila, here it is a beautiful result.



Demonstration of the application itself - in the photos. By the way, if the photo processing did not work (this happened rarely), then the application produced a sad cat.

That's about the same to us and the students were sad when the master class was over.

Eventually

In general, what do you want to say? “The student is no longer tootoo, nowadays it was wooooh ooo” - this is an illusion. There have always been and are curious and inquisitive minds who will find, get to the bottom of the essence, offer their solutions and stomp the older generation with its outdated methods and approaches. We focus on such. And what is most interesting is that only such people are guided by us, because it is interesting for us to work only for those guys who are set to grow and develop, do not like they did yesterday, but like they will do tomorrow. A good motto turned out.