So, we’re just over half way through the summer break from university, so I thought it would be a nice time to summarise what I’ve been up to.
I’ve spent much of my time working for a company called Forward Thinker Developments which operates from the Enterprise Centre at the university
Much of the work has been on a system which we call QuickSync which syndicates stock levels and information between electronic point of sale (EPOS) systems and websites for fashion shops, saving businesses up to 4 man hours a day stock checking and updating their systems . As one of the benefits of working on the system from the very beginning, to this version 1 release and onwards into the future, I have a 25% stake in the company. I’ll be posting more information on the service, which already has 35 customers, in the near future.
On top of my work on QuickSync I’ve also been developing the new Hull Box Office website. At the moment Hull City Council and some of the larger clubs and venues in the city all use separate, and old, systems to sell tickets and update local people on upcoming events. The council itself doesn’t actually have an online presence for selling tickets to its events and still uses an actual kiosk in the city centre to sell tickets, meaning a lot more effort for potential customers. To resolve this the council, along with Welly and Fruit has contracted us to build them http://www.hullboxoffice.com, which will be the one stop shop for buying tickets for events in Hull, including club nights like Shinobi at Welly. I will of course update this blog when the site goes live.
I’ve been enjoying doing my commercial work, which I hope will have lots of happy users, but the project I’m most excited about is my final year project.
Since my last blog post I’ve been working on the auto complete algorithms, and am starting to get to a point at which I’m really happen with them. I’m testing the usefulness of the algorithm I have created using the test harness you can see in the image below, in which you enter a search term — in the real IDE this would just be the letters you have typed since the last token — and it delivers back to you a list of the functions you are most likely to want. At the moment it contains a list of all the built in functions of PHP, but ofcourse this will be expanded to contain user-created functions as well in the finished product.
For now I’ll keep quiet on how exactly I do this, but I will be open sourcing the application towards the end of development next year, so you will see then!
I hope everyone’s had a good summer, and I look forward to seeing many of my readers back at University in September! Remember to look out for posts about QuickSync and The Hull Box Office.
Danny
dannybrown.blog 