When you buy a server, what does it do? It starts up and handles processing tasks. The more computing power you need, the more powerful your server will be. This is not so green for the earth with the amounts of CO2 it produces. Today the growing demand for data and the use of online services is putting a lot of pressure on the carbon footprint of data centres. To help build and manage these facilities, server makers and hosting companies have started to look for alternative solutions.

Similarly we at icrewsystems have examined the potential of a promising technology that could revolutionise the way we use servers in terms of the carbon consumption. The main idea behind this initiative was from our dear founder Leonard Selvaraja CEO. He suggested that we plant an equal amount of trees for the amount co2 a server will produce. 

Hence project GreenEarth was established with a aim to plant more trees and neutral carbon emission from the data servers with this the project lead by Samay Bhattacharrya Lead developer and Head of engineering of icrewsystems has planned to reach out to companies who want to go carbon neutral from their servers such companies will register on greenearth and when the company share it’s server usage details a estimated amount of carbon emission is calculated by greenearth and a estimated amount of cost of planting a tree and the proposal is sent to back to the interested company. Icrewsystems then collaborate’s with a NGO for planting the trees entire amount of cost of setting up the trees in paid upfront to the NGO. Once the trees are successfully planted an update is sent to the customer with pictures of the health of the sapling upto a full born tree, and other extra costs associated with growing the tree successfully every month i.e fertilizers etc... With this icrewsystems awards a certificate of appreciation and a carbon neutral badge when all the required trees are successfully planted.

We are also proud to announce that this is an open source  project and anyone is welcome to bring their creative ideas to light and the work done in developing greenearth from scratch has been done by Rishi Kataria, Shreya Rani, Mehal Sakhti and Hafiz Mutalib under the leadership of DInesh Kumar and Thirumalai Raj. We thank their generous efforts and contribution towards the Greenearth initiative by icrewsystems.

Link to our open source Github repository: https://github.com/icrewsystemsofficial/GreenEarth  

We at icrewsystems, a Chennai based IT and Web services startup want to break the news to you that we have been awarded for being one of the top 15 Emerging IT startups in India for the year 2021. The award was announced at the annual “Business talks BTALKS publications. It is a national award program that recognizes the country’s best emerging technology companies around India.

The IT sector of India is a competitive global industry soaring high worldwide. India’s IT Service Industry is one of the flourishing industries providing its clients with the finest informational technology services. IT companies are now a significant part of big businesses as the world is all about everything digital nowadays. From insurance slips to medical reports; from payroll to customer services; from call centers to legal systems to education, every industry is thriving in the market through technology and software.

Over the last couple of years icrewsystems has identified businesses that had the potential to grow over the internet. The team of icrewsystems has relentlessly contributed and delivered top technology, softwares, web services, modules and IT services to businesses in need. We have been fortunate enough to work with companies with emerging ideas from the edtech industry, aviation industry, electrical industry, e-commerce industry, NGO’s and the list goes on.

Behind the success of this award lies the vision of our Founder Leonard Selvaraja CEO, Co founder Rahul Sharma CFO and Co founder Sooryah Prasath COO and all the hard work our employees have put in achieving so much with our employee’s dedication brought many ideas to light. We look forward to serving more people and aim to become one of the top IT companies India, We thank BTALKS publications wholeheartedly for this award.

Well, nothing much has been learnt from the Spanish flu history at least on the technological front, wondering why am I saying this? Let me ask you a question.

When was the last time you were able to get your hands on a trustable and verified covid19 resources website. Can’t find that date or moment right?

Here is where the issue lies, the pandemic of 1918 which was by far the worst pandemic in history, had left many things for us to be learnt and when confronted again by the next pandemic we aren’t applying the desired changes in our framework. Like appropriate resources, trusted websites and much more.

But here I’ve got a solution for you, https://covid19verifiedresources.in/ a simple one click website, wherein you shall get all the details about any particular services which you require during Covid19 treatment. 

Not only it provides relevant  information but also it is verified by actual users. What’s better than that?

Every company boasts about its services but a customer can only give an actual review or verification to another customer. 

How was this idea conceived?

Not to much surprise any astute idea is developed only when you or you see someone facing an issue regarding something. 

So was my case, this idea struck me when I saw my CEO Leonard Selveraja facing an issue with finding ethical and verified resources in a short span of time.

Either the resources seemed dubious or they were in the format of excel sheets, PDF’s or whatsapp texts, which makes a person in a hurry anxious. 

The underlying errors which I discovered was 

• Lack of systematic database and mismanagement/duplicity of information through scrupulous means.
• Lack of verified data.

All of these issues sow the seeds of curiosity and a desire to address this issue for the benefit of the upcoming covid patients.

Development Phase

Since we were looking for some reliable data, we need to get our hands on some trusted social networking site. TWITTER! Just as the way the name struck your mind, it struck mine. 

What's a better source than Twitter, not just India but the whole world was clamouring about their experiences and those were actual patient’s experiences and not some experience shared by some hospitals.  

We gathered some volunteers who righteously gathered some verified resources through posting across India and added them to a common database for the access of the common public.

What’s interesting about these mediums is that they allow you to write hashtags about the text you’ve written. Which enables the person in dire need to gather all the texts under that hashtag and use it for his advantage. We downloaded all of those texts and images using Twitter API (Application Programme Interface).

Hashtags used - #covidverifiedresource

We decided to create a simple to operate, accessible & systematic platform for finding verified resources & toto ensure that a particular medical resource is timely available to the person who is in dire need of it. 

To our surprise, at one instance our team was streaming around 1Lac tweets on a daily basis. Honestly, the twitter hashtag scanner was essentially the heart of the project. 

Volunteers

Before anything, I would like to thank my team of hardworking volunteers, who stood up to support a major concern for the betterment of the common public.

We amassed a team of 44 volunteers, whose support was perennial towards the achievement of the set goal. They successfully, gathered all the tweets from the source and marked its credibility on the resource portal.( https://covid19verifiedresources.in/)

Let me tell you an interesting thing, in less than a month’s time frame pur team was able to add over 800 verified resources on the portal. That’s commendable right! I’m proud of them too!

Whatsapp Bot

We had a special and hidden volunteer in our team throughout our journey, Whatsapp Bot. Yes! You read it right.To make finding of the resources even more convenient, we introduced our special volunteer that facilitated the use of machine learning principles to make the entire task hassle free and less time consuming.

So, this is how an idea lead to a transformation into a resourceful website with the help of our volunteers. It was truly a team effort. The website is up & running with verified data being updated regularly. 

Above that, you can contribute in too, NO I’m not asking for some money, you can simply contribute by adding some verified resources to the portal, only those data which has been personally verified by you.

As a generous person, I would request you to make the website best of your use and spread it to as many people as you can as “A part of being human is about helping others”.

Blog Written by Samay Bhattacharyya

So you got a project, and you’re about to work on it, but you’re confused as to which framework to use; should you use laravel or codeigniter, express.js or sails.js, or wait, which language, javascript or PHP? Oh God!, you’ve been in this too right? 

And I have some interesting news for you, so read it till the end!

What’s the solution for this?

Don’t worry, let's start by discussing these burning issues faced by several developers.

Often, the answer for such complicated problems can be understood by a simple example. I am sure most of you have played a First Person Shooter game once in your life, for example, Call of Duty, etc. Imagine you’re playing a similar game, and you’ve come across a situation where you have to take down 5 enemies at once. Mostly in these games, you can use an assault rifle or equivalent, a grenade or equivalent, some kind of knife, and a pistol. Now to take down 5 enemies, who are constantly firing at you, you wouldn’t use a pistol because it's too slow and less powerful, or an assault rifle because it is most probable that they would take you down before you could take them, hence a grenade could be a best option in that case. 

However, imagine you have to take down one enemy then an assault rifle or some pistol or equivalent would be the best option. I’m no good gamer, but you’ve probably got an idea.

Similarly, every framework or library has its own pros and cons, which would decide its use case. Don’t take it in a wrong way but every framework or library can be used to code similar projects as its peer framework or library would do.

Which framework to trust on?

Anyways, so, how to decide which framework to use? 

Considering its fundamental technology that it is used to make, for eg. Laravel is made with PHP, Sails.js is made with NodeJS. Now, NodeJS is good for I/O, non-blocking requests, so if you need something like that, use NodeJS, or use the technology that fits with your purpose. 

Let's consider the frontend frameworks, React, Vue and Angular, which one to use for your next project? Now, Angular has a lot of stuff that comes out of the box, but do you require those, or do you require some normal changes in your DOM that could be easily handled by React? 

While learning a framework you should also look at these stuff too, as it will prove helpful in selecting a technology for your next project. 

If you’re a project manager, the first thing that you should consider is, what technologies does the majority of the developers in your team know? For example, let’s say your team is trained to work with Django, it would make no sense to ask them to code the next project in some other framework than that, because even if the framework is top notch, if your team is not properly trained, then they would not follow the best practices, and hence overall effect of using that new framework shall only stand negative.

Although there might be slight differences between each framework, picking once blindly for your next project might have some repercussions in the long run. If your project does a lot of I/O, use Javascript and NodeJS and takes the advantage of its event looping feature, but if your project has I/O and it could be used in finance industry then you could go for typescript, or any strictly typed language.

But imagine if you chose Javascript, which is a loosely typed language, you might lose track of the trailing decimals and could eventually cause a big error in the long run (You’re familiar with the butterfly effect correct? The wind displaced by the flap of a butterfly can cause a cyclone in other parts of the world).

Conclusion

So, the question still remains, which framework to work with? Honestly speaking, that would only depend upon your use case and it is hard to pick a clear winner without knowing the same. However, it is my personal advice that you go with whatever you know best for a professional project, i.e., the one you’d be making for a company or a client, and keep on experimenting with new frameworks in your personal projects. In that way, you’ll be able to gain knowledge, experiment with technologies and also it won’t harm your professional career if something goes wrong.

Smart and simple right?

Hang on! Remember that interesting news, we are teaching Laravel in our training sessions. Want to get hands-on experience with laravel and vue, write an email to hello@icrewsystems.com. Trust me, it's going to be fun.

(GIF credits: tenor.com)

Blog Written by Shaik Mohammed Suhail - Marketing Intern

Introduction:

Most people want to learn to code but never start because of the number of resources available out there which intimidates new coders and you get lost in the "tutorial hell" where you watch tutorial after tutorial but don't make any progress. I have been there and I know how it feels when your efforts don’t fetch any results as we want them to but you know what? It has happened to every self-taught developer out there. Believe me, I was doing the same thing for god knows how many years. Basically starting a new course every six months and giving it up after a few weeks. What this never-ending tutorial hell thing taught me is that 

• We need to stick to a course
• We need to make projects while learning
• From where we learn doesn't really matter but we should know what we want to learn(I will get into this in a minute)

So I have basically told you the secrets of what every self-taught developer did to learn to code. They picked a course, they didn't move to another one until they completed it, they made a lot of projects because that's what you will be doing when you become a developer and they knew what they were learning.

The first two points speak for themselves and don't need any explanation but the last one "they knew what they were doing" is really really important

So what that means is there are tens of thousands of resources out there online. From expensive online boot camps to cheap Udemy courses to free YouTube videos, you should know what you want to learn for example web development, machine learning, mobile app development, etc.

What I'm trying to say is, you need to know what you want to learn and put all of your efforts into that one thing instead of learning everything. Learning one thing really well is better than learning a little bit of everything.

With that being said I am going to share three of the best resources I came across while dabbling in this tutorial hell and I can say "they helped me learn to code" without any hesitation and I saw myself improving while learning from these free resources.

YouTube:

Many of you might have taught free stuff is not good well I'm going to change it right now. You can learn almost anything in the world from YouTube, not just coding but literally anything (there are videos where they teach you how to drive a car but I wouldn't recommend them) from quantum mechanics to javascript, there are tutorials to everything on youtube and I feel like it's one of the most underrated resources when it has helped every developer. YouTube has a ton of great creators like Traversy Media, The Net Ninja, Hitesh Choudhary, Clever Programmer, and much more who make content related to coding. These are just some of the creators which I used to watch and I'm sure there are a ton of other great creators who post wonderful content. If you want to start from somewhere in your developer journey? Then youtube can be a good start. You will definitely dabble here and there a bit but you will learn a lot from that process and if you don't want that to happen, My next resource recommendation is for you!

FreeCodeCamp:

"Oh Boy! I wish I had known freecodecamp or FCC before" This is what I think when I hear something related to FCC because this website is so good! 

FreeCodeCamp is an NGO that teaches people how to code for free and also provides free certifications for various courses. You learn coding by building projects in FCC and it is the most effective way of learning how to code. You can learn almost everything related to coding and development on this website and did I tell you that they have a very big online community that helps each other out? Yup, FCC is the go-to website if you want to learn to code and it can take you from being a newbie to becoming an entry-level software developer if you put in the time and effort into learning it. FCC has helped over 40,000 people to learn to code and get jobs at major tech companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify, and many more. As I said earlier FCC is the resource I wish I knew earlier but if you want something which is as good as FCC or even better in some cases and you want to learn Web development? Well, the next resource is for you!

TheOdinProject:

Behold the great TheOdinProject or TOP, TOP is also an open-source project which can take you from being a newbie to an entry-level web developer if you put in the time and effort into learning it. TOP basically scraps the whole internet for the best resource to learn Web development and brings them all together and you will also find a part of FreeCodeCamp's curriculum in TOP. TOP has two Full-Stack Web development learning paths, One with Ruby on Rails and another one is the javaScript path. TOP doesn't start off easy like FCC, It makes you set up your own development environment and makes you install Ubuntu (Linux), and teaches you git version control from the start. For some people, this might look super intimidating but for me and many others, it is a blessing because you will be working like a developer from the beginning, and like FCC you will be building projects while learning. The best thing about TOP is that they will make you read all the boring documentation, you might be thinking why I am calling them boring and that is because they are boring but reading the documentation will save you a lot of time later in your career when you're wondering why this thing is not working. TOP will make you think like a real developer when you are learning and helps you become a tough one too. There won't be any spoon-feeding and they will let you figure stuff out which is what you will be doing when you become a developer which makes you resilient in the long run and you will become a good developer. I can talk about TOP all day because it is the resource that I am using right now and I can confidently say I have learned a lot compared to the other courses and resources I used before and that includes FCC too. TOP has a very active community on discord that helps each other and it is one of the best web development learning communities out there. If I can go back in time and tell my curious self something, Who is stuck in tutorial hell, It would be to start TheOdinProject right now.

So these are some of the best free resources out there online if you want to start learning to code. 

If you are a total newbie to this coding world, I would suggest you watch some youtube videos and tutorials to figure out what you want to learn or do and then proceed to either FreeCodeCamp or TheOdinProject and stick to them until you are confident enough to apply for jobs.

Conclusion:

At the end of the day, where you learn from doesn't matter. If you have the will to learn then you will figure out a way that works best for you.

Consistency is the key when you are learning something and your mistakes are your greatest teachers and in order to make mistakes, you need to get your hands dirty by building projects. 

Whatever you want to do you should just start it because I believe taking that first step and starting something is half work done because most people don't even do that. I will repeat this again. Consistency is the key and the difference between a winner and a loser is that the winner tried one more time than the loser.

You learn by doing things, We at icrewsystems offer a great internship program for aspiring web developers which will give you valuable industry experience or if you don’t want to learn to code but want a website for your business, We can also take care of that by making amazing modern websites as per your needs.

Have an idea? Let us make that a reality. Icrewsystems can make stunning modern websites for your needs. Contact us and we will see what amazing work we can do on your idea.

Blog Written by Amuthan Balaji - Developer

Introduction:

Setting up a developer environment can be a challenge but doing it the right way is what matters and by the right way what I mean is to set up everything in a way that boosts the efficiency and productivity of the developer and also eases their work. Here we have given you a bunch of themes and extensions/plugins which help you do just that.

Productivity:

Programming productivity refers to the ratio between the quantity of software produced and the cost (time\money) spent for it. One can say that he\she is more productive by completing more things done on that day, not by filling his/her calendar fully or sitting for long duration and doing nothing. To increase productivity there are certain tools which will make our life easier.

VS Code Intro

Visual Studio Code is one of the top most powerful code editors used by the programming community. As for my experience with VS Code in single word "Awesome". You can do anything and everything you want in your own way with VS Code. Web Development, Machine Learning, Competitive programming etc. It has lots of features: integrated terminal, source version control (GIT), extensions, debugger and much more. I am going to share my setup which increased my productivity level. These upcoming choices are personal preferences, please customize according to your likes, and make a comment of your setup. I am using Git Bash as my default terminal of VS Code. If you want, you can too by following this article

To download VS Code, visit here

Theme

Monaki theme: My favourite theme so far, as I worked and Sublime Text before this resembles the same.

• Cascodia code: After trying different sets of fonts this one looks beautiful for my eyes. To integrate this font style to your editor, follow below articles.

1. To download Cascodia Code Font: Font Download
2. To integrate Cascodia Code into Windows: Integration

• Material Icon theme: In the extensions tab on the right search for "material icon theme" and install. Boom you have changed from boring file icons to exciting icons according to your file extensions.

Plugins \ Extensions

• Live server: To launch a local development server with live reload feature for static & dynamic pages. So, you don't want to locate the file and double click to open and also reloading is automated whenever a change appears on the file, to get the latest changes. To open live server 3 ways,

a. In the status bar, there will be an option saying "Go live", clicking on it will open live server

b. Right click inside the file, and in the context menu you will see an option "Open with Live Server" c.

c. (My favourite) Shortcut key: Alt + L and Alt + O

• Live share: Live Share enables you to quickly collaborate with a friend, classmate, or professor on the same code without the need to sync code or to configure the same development tools, settings, or environment. To get started with using Live Share in VS Code, you'll need to download the Live Share Extension Pack from the Extension Marketplace. More details here
• Prettier: Prettier is an opinionated code formatter. It enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and reprinting it with its own rules that take the maximum line length into account, wrapping code when necessary. To install this, search Prettier in the extensions tab and click install. After installing set, it is the default formatter by changing in settings. Additionally, search for format on save on settings and enable it. So, every time you hit ctrl + s, your code gets pretty. More details here.
• Bracket Pair Colorizer: This extension allows matching brackets to be identified with colours. The user can define which characters to match, and which colours to use. So, you can now reduce the confusion that you closed that bracket or not.More details here (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=CoenraadS.bracket-pair-colorizer)
• Auto Rename Tag: When you rename one HTML/XML tag, automatically rename the paired HTML/XML tag.
• Color Highlight: Highlights the web colors in your editors.
• Todo Tree: This extension quickly searches (using ripgrep) your workspace for comment tags like TODO and FIXME, and displays them in a tree view in the explorer pane. Clicking a TODO within the tree will open the file and put the cursor on the line containing the TODO. Found TODOs can also be highlighted in open files. 
• Code Snap: Take beautiful screenshots of your code in VS Code! Features
• Quickly save screenshots of your code

1. Copy screenshots to your clipboard
2. Show line numbers
3. Many other configuration options

• Peacock: Subtly change the color of your Visual Studio Code workspace. Ideal when you have multiple VS Code instances, use VS Live Share, or use VS Code's Remote features, and you want to quickly identify your editor. Open Extensions sidebar panel in Visual Studio Code and choose the menu options for View → Extensions. Search for Peacock. Click Install. Click Reload, if required.
• Laravel Extension Pack (Laravel developers): This extension pack is set of 10 extensions which will help Laravel developers. In the extensions tab search for Laravel extension pack and click install. By using this extension Laravel development has been made easier for me.
• Vetur (Vue Js Developers): This extension enables Vue tooling for VS Code. This is packed with a lot of features like:

1. Syntax highlighting
2. Semantic-highlighting
3. Snippet
4. Emmet
5. Linting \ Error Checking
6. Formatting

and much more. To use this search for Vetur in the extensions tab and click install.

Conclusion:

These productivity tools help you achieve more in less time span and ease your workload a lot. These are the same tools we use at icrewsystems and they have majorly impacted our workflow for the better and made us more efficient and productive. Check out our other blogs for more informational hacks and tools to improve your development lifecycle.

Have an idea? Let us make that a reality. Icrewsystems can make stunning modern websites for your needs. Contact us and we will see what amazing work we can do on your idea.