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2020 Q2 Developer Onwards: Staying Connected While Remote Featured

2020 Q2 Developer Onwards: Staying Connected While Remote

By Author: William Du In Developer

Technology to connect people over long distances is constantly evolving and today it’s easier than ever for developers to integrate audio and video features into their applications without worrying about building complex networks and routing algorithms. Now all it takes is a few lines of code to easily embed audio/video chat or live streaming.

At Agora, we are not satisfied with just providing you with the ability to integrate these real-time technologies. We want the online experience to vividly mimic an in-person experience, which means our Real-Time Engagement (RTE) platform handles network complexities to ensure low latency yet high quality results.

Because of Shelter-In-Place orders, moving traditional in-person engagement online is a necessary trend. We have seen you, our Agora developer community, leading this trend with your creative projects. We will continue to support you with educational programs that will inspire and teach you how to build Real-Time Engagement projects.

Let’s start with a live-streaming application made by an Agora Student Ambassador.

Agoragram

The demo of Agoragram

Agora Student Ambassadors are a group of innovative student leaders who have been developing projects to explore the possibilities of Agora SDKs.

One of the Student Ambassadors, Akarsh Ashok is a self-taught mobile developer who was motivated to create apps that can connect people. As live-streaming social media apps like Periscope and Facebook Live become trendy, Akarsh was inspired to build a live-streaming social media app called Agoragram that can connect people and provide entertainment while staying at home.

Agoragram is a social media application that lets users not only share their images but also live-stream their lives to thousands of people. Agoragram includes key Agora SDK features like one-to-many streaming, live commenting, and other features like signup/login, and emoji. This Instagram Live-inspired app demonstrates the flexibility and possibility of Agora SDKs.

Check out his GitHub repository: https://github.com/Akchy/Agora-Live-Broadcasting

Student Ambassador Profile:

“My name is Akarsh Ashok. I am a student from NSS College of Engineering Palakkad and an Android (Native), Flutter developer. I have taught myself coding since I was 12. The first app I made was a weather reporting Android application with my friends. Since then, I’ve been immersing myself into mobile development. I am now an Agora Student Ambassador and a student lead in my local community.


HackDSC (April 24-26):

We kicked off a spring marathon of virtual events with HackDSC hackathon, partnering with Developer Student Clubs (DSC), the official Google student developer group. As a leader in the Real-Time Engagement industry, we are proud to become one of the first sponsors and supporters of this student-led event. Joel Thomas and Vineeth Srinivasan, Agora Developer Evangelists, shared their knowledge about how Real-Time Engagement is changing the way people connect with each other and how to use React Native to build a video chat app.

Although this was a niche event, it drew in about 200 student developers across high schools and universities from Canada and the United States. Many interesting projects came out from this hackathon so it was difficult to pick the winners, but here are the top three:

First Place: eduSpace

eduSpace is a virtual classroom platform with an emphasis on community and peer-to-peer collaboration. As most schools and universities are closed, students have to not only take classes online but also need a space to engage with peers virtually. eduSpace provides both a platform for online education and social space for students to chat and hang out with each other through custom video chat and messaging features.

Project Profile: https://devpost.com/software/eduspace-9ly8ep

Second Place: Virtual Tech Teens

Virtual Tech Teens is a mobile application that connects the elderly who need technical assistance with certified and tech-savvy individuals. The team, made up of five high school students, was inspired by a program hosted by Santa Monica Public Library, in which teenagers could interact with the elderly through free tech help. Their creative ideas and community-driven dedication help them stand out and win the hackathon.

Project Profile: https://devpost.com/software/techteens

Third Place: Lingua Talk

Lingua Talk is a language-learning app built upon Agora Flutter SDK. It connects students with teachers for 1-on-1 online language lessons. Different from other language learning apps, Lingua Talk focuses on human interaction and culture sharing during the language learning process.

Project Profile: https://devpost.com/software/lingua-talk


DubsTech Workshop (May 13)

As many universities moved their coursework online, we wanted to help keep the learning momentum going.

On May 13th, we hosted a quickstart workshop, partnering with DubsTech from the University of Washington. DubsTech is a student organization that aims to help students with various backgrounds and skill-levels grow their technical skills. The one-hour workshop, led by Jonathan Fotland, an Agora Developer Evangelist, taught students how to build a basic video call app on the web. This hands-on live coding session not only provided an opportunity for students to learn new skills, but also allowed them to build something that can be added to their professional portfolio.


Virtual Workshop Series (May 16 – 30)

Three Agora Superstars took the initiative to provide virtual workshops covering the topics that developer communities are most excited about. These step-by-step live workshops provided hands-on experience in building functional apps in one hour.

The screenshots of the tele-education web app.

Many developers are interested in building tele-education apps that can empower students to continue their education while staying at home. On May 16th, we invited Shriya Ramkrishnan, Agora Superstar, to give a live tutorial with a pre-built app template on how to build an education app on the web. In this workshop, the audience had the hands-on experience of implementing video chat and whiteboard features with the step-by-step guide.

(Here to checkout the tele-education app template: https://github.com/shriyaRam/template)

Next, we had a highly anticipated React Native workshop hosted by another Agora Superstar, Ekaansh Arora. Ekaansh walked through how to embed video chat features in a cross-platform app through React Native. In addition to the tutorial, he introduced the newly launched React Native UIKit that saves lots of development time. With the new React Native UIKit, developers will have a default design layout which allows them to quickly create a demo.

Streaming social media apps and Flutter are two popular topics in the digital world today. On May 30th, Meherdeep Thakur, Agora Superstar, gave a live coding session to teach how to build a broadcasting social media app on Flutter. Meherdeep provided a step-by-step tutorial on implementing Agora Live-streaming SDK and RTM SDK. With the same skill, you can now build your own live-streaming app like YouTube Live.

The demo of the live-streaming app. 

Click to check out the social media app template: https://github.com/Meherdeep/Interactive-Broadcasting


Developer Evangelist Webinars

Our Developer Evangelists (DE) have built many sample apps and tutorials for developers to learn and explore the Agora SDK use cases. In addition to workshops hosted by the developer community, the DEs host webinars covering various topics and frameworks. During these webinars, developers received in-depth insights about Agora SDKs and have a chance to virtually meet-and-greet with the experts behind many official sample projects.

The first three workshops focused on React Native UIKit and building video chat features into Unity and Unreal Engine projects were a blast. Many developers provided constructive feedback and asked excellent questions.

If you missed those, you can catch the next ones. Here is our webinar schedule.

  • July 15: How to Build a Token Server for Agora Applications
    • Speaker: Hermes Frangoudis
  • August 12: Build a Face Filter Video Chat App
    • Speakers: Shaocheng Yang, Jonathan Fotland
  • August 27: iOS/Android UIKit QSWebinar (IB/Comm)
    • Speakers: Jonathan Fotland, Samyak Jain

You can also follow our event page for registration information: https://www.agora.io/en/events/


Developers Onwards

Our curiosity and passion for making a difference remain locked in full gear in this difficult time. We want to thank everyone in this community for continuously pushing the boundaries of Real-Time Engagement technologies—many of these creative projects inspire others.

If you found any of these programs interesting, consider getting involved in our next developer event. To give you a sneak peek of what is coming, we will host an official Real-Time Engagement virtual hackathon in August. Stay tuned for more details. We hope to see you there.

Stay safe and healthy!

William Du
Developer Community Manager