Blogs in General

Many professionals in industry now-a-days write blogs about their interests or even about the work that they do. So what are the benefits of having a blog? 

Well in a way you are documenting all the work that you've done so that you can later show that you've done what you said you did... Yeah that was a bit confusing. The point is, if I say I've created an application that retrieves Facebook posts based on a keyword(s) and stores that information in a table for sentiment analysis you probably wouldn't believe me, but if I had a blog to back that up then there is no denying that I actually did create that.

Another interesting thing about blogs, is that their use in big data is very useful. You can pay certain companies that let you pull blog data so that you can do sentiment analysis. This lets you gain insight about topics in which you are doing research.

On the other hand, if you are a company that is interesting in better marketing your product to customers then blog data can let you gain insights on how your product is doing. After analysis, the blogs that mention your products you can then improve certain products or remove others.

Usability Testing

In software development, there are three general phases that must be completed in order to have a good product. The first phase is planning. In the planning phase a client specifies the requirements for what they want. Usually the client and the company developing this new product discuss what is reasonable to have and what can be done, this is called the requirements analysis. Once the client and developers agree on the requirements the second phase can commence. The second phase is implementation, testing and documentation. This phase mostly just involves the developers depending on how they go about testing. Lastly, the third phase is deployment and maintenance. In this phase the software is (hopefully) finished and ready to be distributed. Maintenance is done until the end of the product life span which can be a few months to a few years.

Software Development LIfe Cycle

In this post we will discuss one phase in particular, the second phase which involves testing, but more specifically usability testing. Usability testing is a somewhat formal way of testing a product before implementation begins. This process is usually started by drafting up prototypes on paper or on a computer of what the software looks like and certain features of it. Any person will be ok for this process, although it might be useful to use someone who might want to use the product that is being worked on.

Test admin writing comments

The paper prototypes are then used to administer the usability test. One of the developers gives the user a task to do and observes how the user goes about finishing this task. After a good amount of tasks are completed the test is over and the developer can now gain insight as to what should change if anything.

My team and I have done and administered usability tests for an application that we are developing and we gained useful insights. This helped us redesign our front end before we began implementation (saved us some time and work).


So you see, usability testing can go a long way, and it most definitely cuts back the time of re-implementing the design of a product.

QR Codes

In today's technological world, retail companies are becoming increasingly more reliant on customer data. Companies are no longer just tracking your online shopping habits, but also tracking customer's in store habits. Some brick-and-mortar stores now have wireless receivers that can track your phone's Wi-Fi signal. They are starting to do this so that they can better market their products to their customers, so that they can reorganize their stores and change the layout in a manner that will make the customer buy other products not just the ones they wanted.

So how do QR codes fall into this picture? Simple if you haven't thought about it, companies tracking customer's every movement inside a store has privacy issues. When a company begins to do this in a brick and mortar store they have to send out a notice to all their customers. In that notice, there should be options on how to opt-out. One of those options will most likely be a QR code. QR codes are somewhat similar to bar codes in the sense that most generic QR codes are black and white. The major difference though is that QR codes can store a lot more data. A big use for QR codes is to store website information.

Have you used QR codes yet? How about to link it to your LinkedIn profile? I have and if you've taken CS 100W at SJSU you probably have too!

Here's my generic QR code.

Clifford, S., & Hardy, Q. (2013, July 14). Attention, Shoppers: Store Is Tracking
Your Cell. The New York Times. Retrieved April 2, 2014, from 
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/business/attention-shopper-stores-are-tracking-your-cell.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0