快应用比赛

by Rafael Melo

通过拉斐尔·梅洛

我的应用如何在国际学生比赛中获得第三名 (How my App won third place in an International Student Competition)

I developed an App that won third place at the IEEE Mobile Applications Development Contest 2017 (IEEEmadC 2017) among 40+ equally great Apps developed by students all around the world. It was an amazing experience that made me open my mind to new ways of seeing things and to my skills as a developer.

我开发了一款应用程序，该应用程序在2017年IEEE移动应用程序开发竞赛( IEEEmadC 2017 )中获得了第三名，该应用程序是由世界各地的学生开发的40多个同样出色的应用程序。这是一次了不起的经历，使我对事物的新见解以及开发人员的技能敞开心mind。

Here are three things that I believe made my App be chosen among so many interesting and really good applications from students all over the globe and that I’m sure can make your App do it too.

我相信以下三件事使我的应用程序从众多来自世界各地的学生中被选中，这些应用程序非常有趣并且非常好，而且我敢肯定，您的应用程序也可以做到这一点。

1.选择一个对您自己和您周围的人有用的想法。 (1. Choose an idea that is useful for your own life and for others around you.)

The first phase of the contest was the idea phase. More than 200 groups submitted amazing ideas and I was one of them. But just like most people, I had many ideas that I thought were great. How could I choose one and focus on that?

比赛的第一阶段是构思阶段。 200多个小组提出了令人惊讶的想法，而我就是其中之一。 但是，就像大多数人一样，我有很多我认为很棒的想法。 我该如何选择一个并专注于此？

In my city Salvador Bahia, we have many beautiful beaches and are mainly known as a touristic city of Brazil. But most of the year our beaches are polluted because a majority of our rivers receive sewage waters resulting in the beaches becoming dirty. The bright side is that the beaches are perfectly suitable in summer. But when it rains and mostly during other seasons, they become unsuitable with sewage water.

在我的城市萨尔瓦多·巴伊亚(Salvador Bahia)，我们有许多美丽的海滩，主要被称为巴西的旅游城市。但是一年中大部分时间我们的海滩都被污染了，因为我们的大部分河流都接收到污水，导致海滩变脏了。好的一面是海滩非常适合夏天。但是当下雨时(主要是在其他季节)，它们变得不适合污水处理。

Some people just ignore this fact and keep going to the beach risking getting many diseases from the high level of E.coli bacteria in the water. Others just avoid the beach and lose out on one of the most amazing things our city provides. We have really beautiful warm beaches, and some people including many foreign tourists just don’t know about it.

有些人只是忽略了这一事实，而继续去海滩冒险，因为水中的高水平大肠杆菌会感染许多疾病。其他人则只是避开海滩，而错过了这座城市提供的最令人惊奇的事物之一。我们有真正美丽的温暖海滩，有些人，包括许多外国游客，根本不知道。

Most people don’t know that the government measures the level of E.coli bacteria in the beaches and posts it on the internet weekly.

大多数人不知道政府会测量海滩上的大肠杆菌水平，并将其每周发布到互联网上。

When I discovered that, the idea just popped up - an App that returned information on the level of E.coli bacteria on each beach to the public. This would provide tourists and general public a way to know of which beaches to visit. I knew that this idea would not only help me but others as well.

当我发现这一点时，这个想法就突然出现了-一个向公众返回每个海滩上大肠杆菌水平信息的应用程序。这将为游客和公众提供一种了解要参观哪些海滩的方式。我知道这个想法不仅会帮助我，还会帮助其他人。

When the first phase ended I received an email telling me that my idea was one among the 40+ selected. It was an exciting feeling. But I knew that I was about to compete with more than 40 groups of people from around the world and all I had was an idea.

第一阶段结束时，我收到一封电子邮件，告诉我，我的想法是所选40多个想法中的一个。这是一种令人兴奋的感觉。但是我知道我将要与来自世界各地的40多人竞争，而我所拥有的只是一个主意。

2.明智地选择工具，然后使用您已经知道的工具。 (2. Choose your tools wisely and go with what you already know.)

The second phase was development and my idea had to become an App in three months, I didn’t have a group and I had to choose how I would build it.

第二阶段是开发，我的想法必须在三个月内成为一个应用程序，我没有团队，我必须选择构建方式。

The first thing I thought was that since it’s a mobile App competition I should maybe build an Android App with Java or an iOS App with Swift. But the problem was, I didn’t know Java or Swift. I only had sparse knowledge from what I studied in some classes of Java and I’ve never really done anything with Swift. I was tempted to learn one of them for the competition but I had a really short time.

我首先想到的是，因为这是一场移动应用程序竞赛，所以我应该使用Java构建一个Android应用程序或使用Swift构建一个iOS应用程序。但是问题是，我不了解Java或Swift。我只是在某些Java类中学习过的知识很少，而我从未真正使用Swift做任何事情。我很想在比赛中学习其中之一，但是时间很短。

So I took the smart decision to use what I already know. I’m a web developer intern and the main language I’ve worked with is JavaScript. So I decided to use a hybrid platform built on Apache Cordova and it worked. In the first two months I had built almost everything from the front-end and some of the back-end just using JavaScript. The fact that I was comfortable with the language helped me in every aspect.

因此，我明智地决定使用我已经知道的内容。我是一名Web开发人员实习生，并且使用的主要语言是JavaScript。因此，我决定使用基于Apache Cordova构建的混合平台，它可以正常工作。在头两个月中，我几乎只使用JavaScript构建了从前端到后端的几乎所有内容。我对语言感到满意的事实在各个方面都对我有所帮助。

I know that running from something new sounds awful for developers like us. But I believe it’s about knowing the right time to discover something new and the right time to use what you are comfortable with.

我知道，像我们这样的开发人员，从新事物开始听起来很糟糕。但我相信，这是要知道正确的时间来发现新事物，以及正确的时间来使用自己喜欢的东西。

A teacher once told me that,

一位老师告诉我，

Most people fail at some objective because at the most crutial time they decide to try something new instead of what they already know.

大多数人出于某种目标而失败，因为在最关键的时刻，他们决定尝试新事物，而不是已经知道的事物。

In the end of the competition I was glad that I listened to those words.

在比赛结束时，我很高兴听到这些话。

3.您的应用程序适用于人类而非机器-请不要小看设计。 (3. Your App is for humans not machines - Don’t underestimate design.)

My App was almost complete, and I decided to ask my friends what they thought about it. Most of them didn’t like it, and I was less than one month from the competition deadline.

我的应用程序即将完成，我决定问朋友们对此有何想法。 他们中的大多数人都不喜欢它，距比赛截止日期还不到一个月。

It was, in their words, ‘ugly’ and they couldn’t understand how to use it.

用他们的话说，这是“丑陋的”，他们无法理解如何使用它。

I was frustrated: I built an app that I thought was good, but if people couldn’t understand how to use it and they didn’t like it, it was worth almost nothing…

我很沮丧：我开发了一个我认为不错的应用程序，但是如果人们不懂如何使用它，而他们又不喜欢它，那么它几乎一文不值……

So I made the decision to study a little about design, something I thought my entire life that was unnecessary and superfluous. I used what I learned to improve my App so people would be interested in using it. Since I’ve never had classes in my university about design, the Internet was my best friend and I started my journey on something I had never studied before.

因此，我决定研究一些有关设计的知识，我认为这是我一生中不必要且多余的东西。我使用所学的知识来改进我的应用程序，因此人们会对使用它感兴趣。由于我从未在大学里上过与设计有关的课程，因此互联网是我最好的朋友，因此我开始了从未有过的研究。

Design is a universe of it’s own. There are so many fields and theories that you can’t possible learn everything in such a short amount of time. So I decided to focus on two things, user experience and color theory. After some study and a lot of trial and error, I’ve finally reached something that people started to compliment.

设计本身就是一个宇宙。有太多的领域和理论，您不可能在这么短的时间内学到所有东西。因此，我决定专注于两件事， 用户体验和色彩理论 。经过研究和大量的反复试验，我终于得到了人们开始称赞的东西。

It wasn’t ugly anymore and everyone could understand how to use it.

它不再丑陋，每个人都可以理解如何使用它。

It blew my mind.

这让我震惊。

To me that was the part that changed my way of seeing things. Design is something really important and it should be taken seriously. After all, it’s about how users interact with what we create, and users are the most important piece of every system. Without users there is no application. This competition changed forever my idea about design, and it’s something I will carry with me on every project I’m a part of.

对我来说，那是改变我看待事物的方式的一部分。设计真的很重要，应该认真对待。毕竟，这是关于用户如何与我们创建的内容进行交互的，而用户是每个系统中最重要的部分。没有用户，就没有应用程序。这场比赛永远改变了我对设计的想法，在我参与的每个项目中，我都会带着这一点。

At the end of the judging phase I received another email, this time telling me that my App had won the third place, the Computer Society Special Award. I was really happy, not only because I felt like my efforts led me to something great, but because I was one person when I entered the competition and a completely different person when it ended.

在评审阶段的最后，我收到了另一封电子邮件，告诉我我的应用程序已获得第三名，即计算机学会特别奖。我真的很高兴，这不仅是因为我觉得自己的努力使我取得了巨大成就，还因为参加比赛时我是一个人，比赛结束时我是一个完全不同的人。

These are the three things that I think made my App win third place at the IEEEmadC 2017 competition. What really made the judges like my App only they will know, but I do believe that these three things — choosing the right idea, right tools and App design made a difference — and I wanted to share that with people. This experience changed a lot of things for me, and I hope I was able to share this feeling.

这是我认为自己的应用在IEEEmadC 2017竞赛中获得第三名的三件事。只有让他们真正知道让评委喜欢我的App的真正原因，但是我确实相信这三件事-选择正确的想法，正确的工具和App设计会有所作为-我想与人们分享。这次经历对我来说改变了很多事情，希望我能够分享这种感觉。

I would like to thank IEEE for the opportunity and for making so many students come together to build great things, to all the judges for the hard part in choosing only three among so many good Apps and to my girlfriend and friends that helped me so much with the design part.

我要感谢IEEE的机会，并感谢如此多的学生聚集在一起，共同开发出很棒的东西，感谢所有的评委，让他们在如此众多的好应用程序中仅选择三个，并感谢我的女友和朋友们给我提供了很多帮助与设计部分。

Here is a look at all the winners.

看一下所有获奖者。