Engineering Elegance

GoAccess

I have discovered this useful tool for web-server log analysis – GoAccess. It is a pretty nifty tool and shows various information collated from a typical NCSA log file produced by most web-servers. This tool came in handy recently, particularly when trouble-shooting specific customer complaints about a service that we launched for a client. I would often extract the relevant portions from the main log file and use this tool to visualise the affected customer’s issue. While this tool does Read more

By Shawn, ago

Ninth Week Updates

A bug has arose from testing the code for computing the final results of the contestants. It had to do with not being able to receive all the documents in the database. After investigating it further, I discovered there was a default limit set on the number of documents returned. Initially I increased the limit to a higher number, but was advised against doing so due to the document count possibly exceeding the limit or a huge limit placing a Read more

By Legin, ago
Photo by Giorgio Tomassetti on Unsplash
Photo by Vojtech Bruzek on Unsplash

Wrapping Up

This week was spent entirely on debugging and testing to ensure that the final interface would be as seamless and optimal as possible. While writing my code I had overlooked some finer details with regards to how the data would change between interfaces when going from one role to another and this created some pitfalls that had to be addressed as in such cases my previous code would display glitchy results to the user. Another mistake that I had to Read more

By Muhammad Uzair, ago

Generating Infographics

To provide more value for the candidates in the competition, my task this week was to generate graphs which will be sent to them by email, that depict how well they did in relation to others. I started with using a TSV parser to pass the spreadsheet I generated earlier as input to produce the graphs. Then I created histograms of the scores by venue, by instrument and by category using R. Next I added an additional point or line Read more

By Legin, ago

Just in Time?

This week went busier than any other in my internship so far. Since the start of the week till the very end I was constantly involved with one task or another. Having finished the final interface as per the previous design, I began wrapping up by adding the final touches. Since this year the competition I am developing the interface for is being held online I had to make some changes to one of the interfaces from last years design Read more

By Muhammad Uzair, ago

Seventh Week Updates

During the seventh week, I made some modifications to the program for generating the PDF and spreadsheet for the competition results, such as including more data per page and adding date to the PDF. Next I tried finding a suitable library for producing some charts that can reveal useful information to the candidate. For example, these charts could show how well the candidate did in relation not only within the same region, but also in relation to different regions. I Read more

By Legin, ago
Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

Cutting it Short

This last week has been quite hectic and busy. With August 15th just around the corner I have had to speed things up quite a lot and any spare time I used to have previously is missing from my daily routine these days. With the migration to Vue Router and Vuex complete I finalized the functionality for all three of my first interfaces and built basic security protocols to act as substitute navigation guards when browsing across different web pages Read more

By Muhammad Uzair, ago

Generating TSV and PDF files

My current tasks involve generating a spreadsheet and a PDF file from the database. To create the .tsv file, I opened a new file and wrote into it details of the players and performances of the database. I first wrote into the file the headers of the spreadsheet. Next I sent a HTTP request to grab the performance and result documents based off each event document, with the event documents grabbed based off each venue document. To improve efficiency, Dr Read more

By Legin, ago
Photo by Vojtech Bruzek on Unsplash

Pressing Brakes

This week was rather unproductive in the sense that I made no apparent progress towards any of my designs. But saying this whole week was a waste wouldn’t be accurate either as I have made some progress, albeit in a different sense. Creating a small Single Page Application with a framework like Vuejs is relatively easy and even a novice could pick it up fairly quickly. As the project starts to scale, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor all Read more

By Muhammad Uzair, ago

Completing ServerApplication

Next in ServerApplication, I worked on generating the result documents. To generate the result document ID, Poco::UUIDGenerator is used. This UUID cannot be randomly generated, otherwise additional unwanted result documents could be created. With the createFromName() member function, the UUID created is set to be dependent on the performance ID. Thus, no extra result document will be created for a performance. We also want to allow the result documents to be updated. For example, if one judge happens to only Read more

By Legin, ago
Photo by Charles Deluvio 🇵🇭🇨🇦 on Unsplash