We had the special CodeRunner Kids activity for April 23.
Our children love to play, but this time we experienced together how the games they play are created. We kindly thank all the children participated in our event.
See amazing examples of things we’ve coded; Melike, Melih Kamil, Defne & Kaan
Happy April 23 National Sovereignty and Children’s Day!
Forests cover approximately the 30% of the land mass of our planet. While forests provide food, medicine, fuel for more than one billion people, people ruin this fundamental living space on a large scale and cause deforestation. Unfortunately, long-term benefits of trees are sacrificed for short-term gain.
This year, one of the topics of World Economic Forum was the long-terms hardships of climate change alongside decreasing the economical and political threats. Limiting climate change is on our hands just like we reversed the ozone depletion. Because there is one earth only and the risks awaiting us in the next 10 years can bee seen in the table below.
In terms of long-term risks, according to the report in which all the first 5 global risks of the next 10 years was about environment for the first time, extraordinary weather events, failures about decreasing climate change, large-scale natural disasters, loss of biological diversity, the downfall of ecosystem and the damages people cause to the environment are seen as global risks that can cause serious effects.
Deforestation
With the general definition, it is making the forests or planted fields non-forested lands by ruining them. Turning forestlands into fields, farms or urban usage areas can be shown as an example.
The positive impact of forests and trees make the base of our existence. For this reason, they touch a lot of areas from fighting poverty and hunger to decreasing climate change and protecting biodiversity. We can sort out some of the impacts that touch our lives like this:
In 1997 , Indonesia’s rain forests were burned down to make roads; the fire intensified with drought. Trees didn’t produce fruits, fruit bats didn’t have a choice but to fly somewhere else to look for food, and brought along a deadly disease. A short time after the bats places on the trees of Malaysia gardens, the pigs around them started to get sick. They probably started getting sick after they ate the fruits that fell onto the ground after bats chewed them, just like the pig farmers… In 1999, 265 people had a serious brain infection and 105 people died. It was the first know break-out of the Nipah virus among people, and this caused recurring pandemics in Southeast Asia from then.
In the last 20 years, scientific researches show that deforestation creates parasites that cause deadly diseases like malaria and Lyme caused by contagious viruses like Nipah, Lassa viruses by triggering a complicated action sequence. A lot of viruses coexist with the animals in the forests without any harm, because animals have evolved with them. But when humans go into the forest habitat or change it, they can be unwanted owners of pathogens. Also, the rodents that carry viruses have been detected in deforested lands in Panama, Bolivia and Brazil.
The three out of four of world’s freshwater comes from forests basins and the quality of water is impacted by the loss of trees. Forests are our water fountains. They provide water for more then 1/3 of the world’s biggest cities.
Source of income and food safety of around 250 million of rural poor household depend on live forests and trees. Even around 50% of the fruit we eat come from trees; thus, non-wood forest products (NWFP) provide as food as well. Increasing food security without reducing forestland is one of the biggest hardships of modern-day.
Around 2,4 billion people utilize wood for cooking, boiling water and heating. In general, forests provide approximately the 40% of global renewable energy as wood fuel. For that, it is necessary to focus on producing wood fuel more sustainably to reduce deforestation.
Forests that act as carbon sinks, are equal to approximately 2 billion tone carbon dioxide each year.
Children are usually more active when they are in a green field. For example, the rate of obesity in children in places where green fields are more reachable is around 11-19% lower compared to places where reaching green fields is limited or impossible.
When we analyze the World Economic Forum outputs in terms of the risks all these impacts will cause in short-time, extraordinary heat waves and degradation of natural life is among the negative impacts of which increase is expected in the upcoming period.
Have you ever thought why leading companies of the world are trying to integrate the “paperless office” notion to their workflow within the scope of digital transformation? Here are some striking statistics:
According to the statistical data, to make 100% non-recycled 10 batches of copying paper a bit more than half a tree is needed. A tree produces a bit more than 8333 paper sheets; for a roll paper of 500 sheets 6% of the tree is used.
While some people think that paper usage is a corporate culture, the others use it because of personal habits. But, wouldn’t it be cheaper to create and test digital versions of different business models? In fact, these days there is no aspect of an entity that cannot be modeled. You can choose the digital tools that are suitable for you and create your vision accordingly. We have compiled some of our solutions that will help you during your digitization process.
Let your e-mail signatures reach hundreds of people with Sign&GO.
As e-mail signatures take the place of business cards, the importance of messages they transmit increases. You can both announce your brand perception the best way possible and use the fastest and cheapest communication tool to increase your recognition with e-mail signatures that will reflect your corporate identity. Using less business cards equals to cutting less trees.
At the same time, it is not very easy to reach out to your customers fast and keep them up-to-date nowadays. Conveying your informative messages, current news to a lot of people will enable you to reach out to the right audience with your e-mail signatures. With your e-mail signatures, you can transmit messages that you can add like “During these hard times our country is going through, we are thinking about you, our partners, and share the most productive working methods on digital platforms with you” to hundreds of people.
Velocity is an intranet platform that digitizes and facilitates all the communication processes of companies. We know that the some of the essentials of a portal that creates your corporate culture are announcements, files, request forms (off-day, expenses, advance, training etc.). All these processes help you to solve your communication in a fast and integrated way with zero paper consumption.
You will spend less time sharing files and documents with your other branches. Enables you to show your corporate announcements on a single platform without needing any printed material like brochures of banners. It also helps you to publish documents in scope of Law of Protection of the Personal Data like employee clarification text and vehicle tracking system clarification text without using any paper.
Maybe we should leave the old application methods aside and change to digital tools and create paper-free projects. During process we might be able to save our money, energy and a few forests… We should at least try it. Our world needs oxygen, water, food and our children.
We can start the change from our office where we spend most of our time and our corporate culture with digital workplace applications. Because one day some topics we remain distant from might become an obligation. Just like the Covid-19 pandemic that caused us to lock ourselves in the house. We wish everyone a health feature.
Sources:
Intranet is the most important and effective notion between a company’s workers. When we look at it, this notion is pretty simple but when we go into more details it gives us a range that helps us to create a corporate image and increase productivity.
As important the communication notion is while creating the corporate culture, you can also make it dynamic with the portal structure that will accompany you in your digitization processes and keeping up with the changing and developing world.
Let’s get into more details…
HR Departments have the biggest part of responsibility in terms of enabling a strong and dynamic structure in intranet processes. They relieve their workload by publishing the announcements on the portal. They manage the processes through a single center with sections like LPPD, Performance Management, OHS documents and open positions.
The palest ink is stronger than the sharpest memory. Files, the apple of companies’ eyes… Finding them on a secure common workplace will be one of the best factors that will relieve the workers’ workloads.
The joy of the portal; celebration corner… It becomes a piece that celebrates new friends that have joined us, birthdays and brings our emotions together and that cheers us all up.
Considering that employee loyalty is achieved through touching their social lives; the portal keeps people within itself with horoscope, news, market condition, movies, music and books.
Every company has multiple applications and communication tools that they use. Let’s benefit from the blessings the portal offers us at the same time and speed with the integration of a lot of different themed applications like finance, marketing, customer relations, sales and management. 😊
The most important goal of the portal that solves the hardest matters for you is to increase productivity by staying on a single common area, to provide organization and parallel to that, to offer us a corporate culture with a mature and strong communication.
The first step is to decide to use a prepared portal for your company and employees.
And the second step is to meet Velocity!
In this article I will be answering the question of “How to add a Git Android library project as a sub-module?” but i don’t really know where to start. I think I’d better start with the time I asked myself “How do I add an android project to another android project?” Where and why such a need came to be?
Everything started last year a few weeks ago. When my recruitment process was going on in Peakup, I bombarded the Peakup Labs department manager Emrah Uslu with a ton of questions like “How many projects are we going to do? What kind of projects are you planning to do? Is there a Native Mobile developer in the team? (This question means “is there a legacy code” and you need to ask it) during the technical interview we had. He said “There are a lot of projects to be done, don’t worry” and added that we were going to do a lot of big and small projects rather than a project that would take years. The idea of “a library that can be used in common between different projects” that came into my mind in my previous job made sense once again. I don’t remember if I mentioned this to him. He especially requested my to create a common library from the first day I started working.
For example, the Login and Language settings pages exist in all our projects and they are all the same. Or we will develop tons of methods, customized buttons, a wide arrange of views (CustomView), extension function, web service request architecture and DSL and these need to be in all the projects. As if that were not enough, they are all the same. Instead of going in the copy-paste loop and turning the project into thrash, isn’t it more simple and reasonable to add the common pages and features into a library and use them commonly from there?
I experienced a huge harm of copy-paste before. There for 8-10 projects created by being forked by each other. The smallest change of service meant to make this change in every single one of them one by one. Doesn’t matter what you say, this is not an example of good development. Don’t do it. Stay away from it. You can use the fork feature way more efficiently and do use it.
Open/Closed Principle, Software Reuse Don’t Repeat Yourself. Even when you think about it, you will see that all of the SOLID principles substantially support he library systems, and don’t find copying and pasting codes reasonable.
I think I’ve talked about what it is and why it is necessary enough. If you have a question like “Alright, got it, but how exactly?” roaming in your mind, please be my guest. When we mentioned libraries, the first thing that came to my mind is JAR files. But I realized that JAR files can only store the ones in Java SDK class. They don’t contain classes like Activity, Fragment, SharedPreferences, WifiManager like in the Android SDK. In the library structure I want, there must be structures like Activity, SharedPreferences. Another structure that comes to our mind in this situation is the AAR files. AAR files have some disadvantages. The biggest one of them is that you need to create an AAR file and add it to your projects every time you add a code. Keeping in mind that there is no legacy code in Peakup, and the library and main applications are created from scratch, together and parallelly; it really is a pain in the neck to deal with the AAR files. Yes, since they would take up a smaller place, AAR files would be my choice if they were created and prepared before in the library, but of course it is not like that.
When we take a look at the requirements:
So here came the Submodule into the play, which is a feature of Git.
The library had to have an Authenticator layer that would be used the same way in each project. You know, the login screen. Since this is the most important job of the library, we named it as PeakAuth. From that day on, I go like “PeakAuth come here, PeakAuth go” and it has kind of become my child. I loved it and until I switched to iOS I always developed it and added something all the time. The first Android App I created in Peakup was EnviSense. And it just got bigger and bigger in time with me saying” Heyy, I would use this extension function in other projects, let me add it to PeakAuth. Heyy, why would I write this date format in each project again and again, let me add it to PeakAuth right away” and adding common features and code snippets. You remember how I compared it to a child? It actually was a child.
Note: Since Android Git Submodule is a feature of Git, the library and our main project have to contain git.
Before adding the library to our main project, the PeakAuth needs to be a library first. There are 3 steps to achieve this and they are very simple.
That’s it! Now PeakAuth is a library that can be commonly used with the other projects.
Now it is time to add the library project we have created to Android projects. If you want, you can write this to the README file in Git so that it is easier for your friends. And also this type of important points shouldn’t be dependent on one developer in the company only. In addition, not just the creater bu the other developers should be able understand easily, add and use when it’s needed. Just like I mentioned a few times, it is clearly explained in the README file how to add the common Android library named PeakAuth that we use in Peakup. I need to mark a very important point in the beginning. You shouldn’t sync till the last step I have written below. The sync will be done after all the connections and settings are made.
After this step the .gitmodule file will be added to your main project automatically.
:include ':peakauth'
project(':peakauth').projectDir = new File('peakauth/app')
implementation project(":peakauth")
If you have mistakenly synced in another step, you need to Reset/Discard all the changes on Git, delete all the added files and restart the whole process. Basically go back to the last commit. I did it a few times and couldn’t find a better way than restarting. I also recommend you to commit before starting to add libraries. So that no other changes happen and you don’t lose codes when you reset completely.
If your project looks nested like in the screen shot, it means that the Android Submodule library is ready for use. As you can see, you can navigate in it as you wish. Which is a feature that the AAR libraries don’t have. The icon in the beginning is important too. And in the screenshot below you can see how your project should look on SourceTree.
You can see how it will look when you commit/push PeakAuth i.e. your submodule library, click on the Submodule below your main project on SourceTree in the screenshot below.
Life Saving Note: Update the submodule only in its own repository. If you update the PeakAuth in the EnviSense, it will reflect on the main PeakAuth and it might mess up all the projects that use the library. If you don’t the submodule carefully, you might cause some chaos. As sweet as it is, the management of it will get harder as the project develops.
If you want more information about the Submodule usage in Android, the 2 resources below helped me a lot. I am attaching them here as well.
https://medium.com/@deepakpk/how-to-add-a-git-android-library-project-as-a-sub-module-c713a653ab1f
https://proandroiddev.com/creating-a-library-for-android-ea976983db1
Click here for the other android related articles on our blog.
Wish you a day fool of kindness, love and reading.
We experienced that most of the remote education and work platforms we used in the past are insufficient. Because we didn’t need to use them this frequently and in detail. Right now, time and productivity are the most important criteria for us. In this situation, while moving the work methods to digitalization in order to keep up with the requests, the security remained in the background. A lot of companies use special work apps for that purpose to save time and energy, for friendly-use and security. One of them is Microsoft Teams…
With the attention and request of companies to the digital workplace increasing, the number of sectors that get to know or use Microsoft Teams now has increased as well. There are a ton of request from all sectors; manufacturing, education and logistics being in the lead. Companies with a high number of workers, branched and sales network, that have more than one office started to utilize the solutions Teams offers.
Microsoft Teams offers a lot of solutions during the pandemic for those who get to know it just now and who want to experience it. Grants companies with a 6-month free trial. While using the Microsoft Teams for 6 months, you can plan meetings and save those meetings. You can make calls and conferences and reach out to a limitless number of users. We compiled a few features of Microsoft Teams that you can use:
Activity
Activity page is a field where you receive and filter notifications. You can receive all the notifications concerning you here. You can follow up on the activity page to make sure that you don’t miss out any announcement made within the school or company.
Save a Message
You can save the messages that are important for you and that you won’t lose time looking for. You can search based on key words with the search button within MS Teams but saving messages for the links, screenshot that you don’t remember will help you a lot in terms of tracking your work.
Files
You can reach and edit all the files like Word, Excel, Pdf shared in chats from the “Files” tab. People who you share the file with will see the latest version of the file. To eliminate the possibility of getting confused about the latest version of a while when a lot of versions are shared, you can update one single file. Also, you can work on each file you share within Teams with your teammates simultaneously doesn’t matter where you are. This way, your file will stay as one version and you will eliminate file pollution. On top of that, it is possible to access the previous version before editing on OneDrive/SharePoint.
Video Call
With the change to online working, the meetings; activities and trainings have started to be cancelled. But the necessary meetings or training stopping might cause hard time for the workflow. You can video call anywhere with the meeting you can have on MS Teams. You can join the meetings on your phone, tablet or computer. You can chat, share your file or screen during the meeting.
MS Teams brings innovative solutions to the classical intranet portal structures that most companies are using. You can add your own communication portal to your system quickly by downloading the Velocity app from the app catalogue. Platforms like Velocity that strengthen the intranet don’t just help with the workflow. It is also very beneficial for the workers or students that go through problems like loss of motivation or depression during these times in which we work remotely, and our socializing options are really limited. We can sustain communication with each other all the time, from one single center, stronger and problem-free with Velocity; doesn’t matter how far we are.
In the evaluation done among all the applications, Velocity achieved being one of the top 8 applications in global that can be integrated to Microsoft Teams. You can easily track your communication and workflow with Velocity that you can access within Microsoft Teams. You don’t just keep in touch with your workflow but with your teammates and managers as well with your social posts. You get to have a common workplace with your teammates even though it is remote. You can access your files, announcements, documents, horoscope, service hours and many more information within the application card and share your corporate communication and culture with all your workers simultaneously.
While having an area where you can socialize, recommend books, series, movies; you can also follow up everything you need to know like work security, Covid-19 announcement of HR, Law of Protection of Personal Data. As companies and educational institutions, we have to adapt to digitalizing in order to overcome these hard days damage-free and to manage this process the best way possible we need to get helps from intranet platforms. So, we need to make remote working and education as simple as possible.
COO of PEAKUP, the 1st in spreading Microsoft Teams in Turkey and the inventor of Velocity, Kadircan Toprakçı stated: “Remote working will be a fact of our lives after the pandemic. It is very important to internalize all the digital experiences we gained during this process. Because the global effect that reached a serious dimension economically, will only decrease with digitalization. We will be able to close the gap with the productivity and acceleration this new work processes granted use. Microsoft Teams and Velocity apps create a twin of the physical office environment we miss a lot. We can say that the most important assistant of human resources and management teams will be Microsoft Teams and Velocity apps during this period of time in which we are mentally affected.”
100% national capital PEAKUP has been in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 list for the 3rd time with its successful performance and keeps growing with its England office.
PEAKUP CEO Ahmet Toprakçı has stated that they are moving towards their goals of being a global technology company fast and said: “In this journey we barked on to provide quality and value added services, we keep working to create a global brand. As we enter our 8th year, we started to keep our work with the title of PEAKUP Technology inc. as of July in accordance with our strategy of popularizing our products abroad. Within this period , we believe that our country will develop with technology export and keep working to make PEAKUP a global technology company with our competent, young and high-motivated staff. And as the first step of this, we established a company that is 100% owned by us.”
PEAKUP has grown with domestic funding only without any foreign investments, and now has its eyes on the US market after the London office they’ve opened in July. PEAKUP has entered the European countries, UK being the first, with Sign&Go that it developed as new generation marketing technology. One of the abroad goals of PEAKUP is after the COVID-19 period being done, to enter the US market.
You can watch the details of the interview we did with PEAKUP CEO Ahmet Toprakçı here.
Velocity was chosen among the top 8 applications that can be integrated to Microsoft Teams in global with the evaluation done of all the applications. You can communicate and track your work easier with Velocity that you can access on Microsoft Teams. You communicate without any gaps not only in your work process but also with your teammates and managers through your social posts.
We kindly thank everyone who believed and supported Velocity!
We are the first corporation to get the Adoption & Change Management Advanced Specialization in the Middle East and Africa region (MEA) and the 4th worldwide with Change Management Services we give on services like Microsoft Teams, Azure, Office 365 in order to enable right integration of new generation work places and technology to workflow.
We added another one to our achievements, and with our knowledge and experience proved that we are the best in this matter by ranking first in MEA.
We help more than 700.000 end users migrate to cloud technologies and keep achieving even more every day while providing help for our partners to change to new processes with our expert staff in America, Europe, Middle East and Africa with our solutions.
We are proud to be the first one in MEA to have this specialization status that Microsoft gives to limited number of partners worldwide, and kindly thank everyone who supported and believed us during this period.
In Turkey most workers are following their work from home because of the pandemic, just like in the whole world. This obliged employers to switch to remote working on digital platforms and to adapt. So, what should we be careful about while working from home?
We had to quickly adapt to working from home with the corona virus pandemic. Companies who didn’t want to put people’s lives into danger but still had to keep doing their work started to sustain their work with different platforms. And this reminded us the “Digital Workplace” notion that we started to hear a lot. The way companies did their work changed with the sudden change to remote working. One of the most important topics during this process was making the communication between employees continuous and constant and to keep their motivation alive. PEAKUP told about how right and efficient work will be on online systems with the Velocity and Microsoft Teams experiences and included recommendations about sharing files, video call, chat rooms and teleconference in their guide.
PEAKUP COO Kadircan Toprakçı stated that first the most waited features on digital platforms should be detected and sorted those out like this: “An activity field where notifications are received and filtered, a chat room where files and images can be shared, accessing archived files easily, co-authoring on files with teammates at the same time, video call, sharing announcements and organizing meetings. What is need to do all these correctly is a good internet connection and a secure computer, tablet or phone. Tips and tricks start from right here.
Computer: If your personal computer is not protected well with a good system we recommend you to use your company computer. Using Wi-Fi or 4G/5G connections on a weakly protected computer might let you down. If you believe that your office computer is not safe enough either, it is better to contact the IT department right away. If not, all your company information might be accessed and your archived files might get damaged. The password security of company accounts you connect on your office computers is very important for your data. You need the keep you password security as high as possible, update as much as possible and avoid simple passwords.
Internet connection: The most unpleasant part of digital workplace is internet going down or slowing down in the middle of an important meeting. Increasing the upload quota of internet packages of people who need to share files a lot or video call might be a solution. Apart from that, it is possible to activate the “Personal Hotspot” feature of 4.5G internet access via mobile phones in case of a problem with WiFi networks. The safest way to access resources containing accounting, human resources and similar company data would be choosing the Virtual Desktop applications provided by the IT departments. You have to use VPN for the whole team to connect to the corporate network securely and for the network traffic to go through one tunnel.
Operating Systems: Always prefer to use the latest versions of operating systems and applications. The latest operating system will provide protection against cyber threats with new updates as well as being efficient with new features.
Archiving: You might need to access a file on your work computer or you might have deleted a necessary file while working from home. Your files need to be transportable anytime and anywhere while working remotely. You can securely store all your files with cloud storing solutions like OneDrive and take important actions like going back to previous versions or recovering a deleted item.
Common workplace: You could work with your colleagues while working at the office. But now while remote working, you cannot physically be together if you need to get something done together. Applications like MS Teams help you out during this process. You can move all your office environment to a common workplace, co-author on documents and files with your colleagues, track a lot of actions that were in your daily routines like video call, chat, office documents through one single platform.
Security for the little ones: This one is especially for the workers with kids. To prevent your curios child deleting the files you are working on when you are on a break, you need to put a screen lock and a password. You can use the free Dynamic Lock feature that comes with Windows 10 at this point. Dynamic Lock you have synchronized with your phone will lock your computer the moment you get away from it.
Meetings: Meetings, activities and trainings have started to be cancelled with switching to online working. But meetings or trainings necessary for you workflow getting sidetracked might cause problems for your work. You can sustain your work program without any ado with video meetings and live activities on MS Teams. For example, you can join the meeting from your phone, tablet or computer, chat during the meeting and share a file or your screen.
Socializing with colleagues: This one is both for the workers and the employers. During this process where we are home all time and cannot socialize, it is important to increase the motivation of your workers with platforms that keep the intranet strong like MS Teams or Velocity, not just to keep doing your job. You can create groups where you can recommend movies and make video calls, and have some coffee together. You can make your communication sustainable and fun on digital platforms.
As you know the maximum participant number was 100 on chat groups. Microsoft increases this number to 250 with the request from customers.
The Planner app in Microsoft Teams is changing as the Tasks app! Tasks will enable you to manage personal tasks and tasks assigned to you in a team through one place by consolidating the Microsoft To-do, Planner and Outlook tasks and channels. It will unite the messy tasks all together and group them by importance and due date, and even present them in Teams as lists, pinboards and charts. We think that Teams accepting all application within itself is very exciting!
Teams displaying maximum 4 participants on screen during the meeting was highly criticized compared to their rivals in teleconference. Microsoft has announced that for now this number is 9, and that they are trying to increase this number to display more participants at the same time.
The new Raise Hand feature in Microsoft Teams enables the participants to indicate that they want to speak by changing the hand icon on the control bar, this way facilitates participating to meeting more efficiently. Participant themselves or the presenter can lower their hands. With this feature, we will indicate that we have a question without interrupting the person who is doing a presentation. Just like in a class. 😊
If the people detection feature is active on Microsoft Stream, it detects people’s faces automatically to improve the Microsoft Stream play experience. If the video owner has turned on people timeline for a video, this feature would be displayed for the video.
This feature will be removed because of low usage. It will be removed permanently by July 15.
When you choose the checkbox below, you can add videos with YouTube URLs or images from Bing to you forms. This way, you can make your polls more lively and effective!
Users can show or hide columns in library form or in a SharePoint list depending on the value on another column. You can choose between formulas and columns. For example, you can hide a column depending on the values on another column.
The upcoming “Live Presentations for PowerPoint for web” feature will enable the people who give a presentation to see their slides and words, and even live translations on their device as transcript!
Microsoft Bookings is a self-service meeting organization tool that enables you to organize corporate and non-corporate meetings. Microsoft Bookings app can be used as add-on for Office 365 Corporate E3 and Office 365 Corporate E5 users. Microsoft is turning Booking into an Office 365 app from an add-on in the last update. It is possible to activate or turn off Booking as an organization. User-based restrictions will be available in time.
Users will see the “Meet Now” button next to the channel name, on top-right. This way this feature that gets to be ignored as an icon below will be understood more clearly.
More clear options will be offered to the users while they are joining a Microsoft Teams meeting through a link concerning how/where they want to join the meeting.