Kalibrr Joins Y4iT: The 15th Youth Congress on Information Technology
Kalibrr was honored to join the educational event as our very own experts shared their knowledge: Joseph Pencil, our Vice President of Engineering, discussed Microservice Applications Development; whereas Joan Magno, Senior Product Manager of the Job Search App, talked about the mobile user experience. Now on its 15th year, the annual event was established in 2003. Armed with the mission to enable today’s youth to recognize their own potential as the key drivers in the dynamic IT industry, Y4iT has gone on to be at the forefront of information technology gathering events in the Philippines.
TOPICS
Microservices Architecture
On the second day of the event, Kalibrr’s VP for Engineering Joseph Pencil discussed Microservice Applications Development and its importance and benefits in developing software in the future. “A microservice architecture (MSA) promotes developing and deploying applications composed of independent, autonomous, modular, self-contained units,” Joseph explains. MSA breaks software into smaller units that each have a single, discrete responsibility that can function independently of the software around them and which makes up the rest of the stack.
He simplified the explanation and resembled it to Lego blocks: Each block can be put into any location to create a whole; each block has a purpose of its own context (size, shape & color); and each blocks are created without consideration of the whole’s context. He further compared this to traditional, monolithic applications and how it is is fundamentally different in terms of how it’s designed, developed, deployed and managed. Towards the end of his talk, Joseph shares that microservices will have a powerful impact on procurement patterns in the multiscreen environment, breaking up end-to-end monolithic service stacks over time.
The Mobile Experience
In another talk, Joan Magno, Senior Product Manager for Kalibrr’s Job Search App, discussed the best strategies for potential mobile app developers in the room. Titled Crafting the Mobile User Experience,her talk, in essence, was all about the Filipino youth’s unique opportunity to capitalize on mobile today. After all, the country has a 100% penetration rate in terms of mobile phone usage. And as the social media capital of the world (90% of Filipino internet users spend 4 hours a day on it), Magno shared her team’s fearless forecast: “The Asian consumer is younger, getting richer and is likely to be only using mobile for the internet.”
When you’re a potential software developer, this spells ripe opportunity. This is why Magno shared the 3 main traits that will help these aspirants produce the best mobile experience for their future products: snappiness, steadiness, and simplicity. Snappiness talks about a “quick and frictionless” experience. As the country with the world’s 3rd lowest internet speed (4.2 mbps)—and with the average internet user possessing an 8-second attention span—speed gets you far. Steadiness is how apps should strive for high ease of use. Users are extremely picky about which apps they keep on their phone. If they don’t have a bug-free experience, they could un-install your app within a matter of seconds. And lastly, simplicity covers the look and feel of the app. In Magno’s words, “Great design is invisible.” It has to be intuitive: users don’t want to think hard when they use your app. Magno ended her talk by discussing how the Kalibrr team strove to follow these 3 principles when they developed Kalibrr’s own mobile app. As the highest rated job search app in Southeast Asia with an average of 4.6 star-ratings, she said that these rules were conducive to their success. And since Asia will define the world’s mobile internet, she emphasized that as long as they followed these 3 rules, they could join in, too.
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