EDGEKIT Participates in Software Freedom Day 2016

With optimism and anticipation, we proudly will participate in the 2016 Software Freedom Day celebration to be held on 17 September at the National Teachers College in the morning and the Technological Institute of the Philippines in the afternoon.

The core topics of the celebration is the Free and Open Source Software, Better Internet, Data Privacy and other recent concerns like the Freedom of Information, Internet of Things, and Data Science.

We at EDGEKIT will discuss our Weapon of Choice composed primarily of OpenBSD and PostgreSQL, what can be done better with them and why, along with software architecture and  development practices especially focused to students and may also benefit professionals.

We are very grateful for the opportunity to Computer Professional's Union, 8Layer Technologies, DevCon, Drupal Pilipinas, Agham Youth, Tudla Productions, Environmental Youth Organization and the host schools National Teachers College and Technological University of the Philippines.

See you there!

UPDATE:
This event was re-scheduled to October 8 in a new venue, the Assembly Hall of the National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG) in UP Diliman. Hope you will continue to support and participate in this event.

We also participated in the Far Eastern University Institute of Technology (FEU Tech) celebration of Software Freedom Day last September 30. This event was organized by the Junior Philippine Computer Society (JPCS) FEU Chapter and MobilityIT4Youth.

We Support the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2016 Hackathon

We at EDGEKIT Computer Systems have always sponsored and supported events that manifest our commitment to ideas we stand for and believe in.

In 2014, we sponsored the Agri Hackathon in Nueva Ecija, because we firmly believe that no humane society can progress and contribute to move forward the civilization of mankind on an empty stomach.

Now, we are gratefully supporting the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2016 to be held in PLDT Innolab at Mandaluyong City from 22 to 24 April 2016. Join us in exploring and showcasing the Filipino potential and first steps in science, technology, engineering and arts to conquer the new frontier.

Be there and together let's move the Philippine space program to infinity and beyond.

2015 Summary and Ideas on Things Aspiring-to-be-Presidents May Consider

The year 2015 has been very productive albeit quiet year for EDGEKIT as a company.

As early as December 2014, we have been quietly designing and developing for our Small and Medium Scale Enterprise clients a small business application system that provides Customer Relationship Management, Sales and Inventory Management, and the fundamental components of an Employee Payroll Management System. We are now offering this solution to interested agents and parties for evaluation and acquisition under a win-win-win situation for the agent, client and company. Please feel free to get in touch with us on this system for more details.

Quality of Education, Startup and the 2016 ASEAN Economic Integration

Coming from the technical standpoint, we can draw an analogy of the good old number of lines of code as measure of productivity with the manual, repetitive and tedious task of writing the teacher's lesson plan, at least for the primary and secondary teachers in the Philippines. Much so in Fred Brooks' classic Mythical Man Month, superior productivity isn't just a matter of writing more code, but also writing the right code to do the job.

In the case of the teachers, could it be that our quality of education is not at par with progressive countries because we are more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of the lesson content? Worse, could it be that the teachers spend more time writing the lesson plan and little on enhancing the lessons by contributing into a lesson plan pool where teachers can share and apply the best practices in conveying knowledge most effectively?

As of this writing, it's the last few days of the last quarter of 2015. The following year, 2016, is the much awaited ASEAN integration, where the member countries of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) will have full integration of economic communities, where locally produced products will have head to head competition with our neighbor countries while enjoying tariff free trade. As noted in this article, it states that we "need to step up our efforts to improve the competitiveness and capability of our various local industries, as we participate in regional and global trade."
In line with this, the local startup community should be supported and strengthened.

Startups are built on ideas, and the breadth, width and depth of ideas can only come from the quality of education provided to our citizenry.

More than ever, the importance and quality of education in our country is highlighted along with the deficiencies and areas of improvement we need to address if we mean to compete and not be ran over by our neaighbor countries in terms of economic, political and technological relevance in 2016 and beyond.

Please share with us and our fellow readers your ideas on how to improve the quality of education that will reflect on the professional and economic competence of our country.