Application critique: Discord

Group 4's presentation is not the first time I heard about Discord, I use the app before and I really like it, so it is my lucky day to be assigned to write about Discord. Here is some of my comment about the presentation. Firstly, I agree that Discord have potential to compete with its competitors (just like its homepage's headline: "It's time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak."). Discord is better than its 2 major opponents in many aspect such as it is free, it has better security and performance, channel and permission management. That's why it achieve huge success in a short period after launching. Secondly, the presenters also describe some bad things about the app such as no user profile, no search, no video chat like Skype. Finally, the presenters talk about Discord's business model. Discord has focus on a specific type of user: gamer. Many of its features are suitable for gamer such as high performance that make the game run smoothly. Discord can make money from microtransations such as selling stickers, themes, ... but they guarantee that the core features are always free. Moreover, Discord has the potential in other field such as: streaming, recording music or tools for presenters (I think this will need video streaming to be feasible).

I also want to add some of my opinions about the app. Firstly, I really like the simplicity of Discord, you don't need to sign-in or register, just need some clicks and typing, then you can share the channel's link with your friends. Of course it need to add the user profile feature for long-term use on multiple devices. Secondly, Discord's IP and DDoS protection is one of the best. I think Discord is the first voice chat that implement it although Skype recently release an update to improve this aspect as well. Personally, I think this feature is very important especially for professional gamer. I watch a lot of gaming tournaments, and I see that in some small-medium tournament, teams and players have to play qualifier on-line which means they have to play from home or the teams' headquaters rather than playing on-LAN. So I saw some players being DDoS and disconnect in the middle of the game, so it ruin the game. The reason is the most profession use Skype (the old version) to communicate, and some attacker manage to obtain their IP and start attacking the player. So I really like Discord since it make security a priority from the first day of development.

Week 3

This week I have to rush assignment 2 which is a seminar about a recently launch application. The app of my team's choice is Prisma which is a very cool photo editor application that can turn your ordinary photos into an artistic painting. More interestingly, the technology that power Prisma is a cutting-edge technology in computer science. It make use of neural network and artificial intelligence. Also Prisma's UI,UX design is wonderful and admirable.

This mod is about parallel computing

Last week is a stressful week. Now I have 2 assignments at the same time which means I have to process them in parallel. My assignment 1 team are still struggle to setup the foundation of the app while assignment 2 team is starting to research on the seminar. Luckily, that I know how to context switch to handle parallel processes :D.

What I hope to learn in CS3216

1. How to build real things:

I don't have much programming experience especially on web programming, so I can learn latest tools use by web developers and build my own big product (which can scale to millions or even billions users). I will also have a chance to tackle real programming problems from designing to implementing.

2. Entrepreneurial thinking:

To make a product success, programming is important, but other aspects such as marketing, user survey, quality assurance are even more important. By working on a real product with teammates from other disciplines, I can learn more about non-programming aspects of developing an electronic product.

3. Teamwork:

I will not and cannot do everything on my own, so I can improve my teamwork skills such as meeting, planning, communicating.