Lucas Woo: Instant iPhone Chat Integration with Live Chat SDK

This series of blogs brings you a little closer to our active student contributors for the Google Summer of Code 2017 summer season. You will see their ongoing work featured throughout our GitHub repositories. Feel free to drop by and say hello, or start collaborating on any of the projects.Lucas Woo is confident in his career choice in coding "With just one client terminal and a high speed network connection- you can connect with anyone and do almost anything. It's amazing!"Lucas is currently studying Computer Science at Hangzhou Dianzi University. During his time there, he has so far worked on an iOS app for both students and faculty of the university to keep track of their study and work information on campus. What's more, Lucas has also worked on a REST API that is part of the Open data platform of Hangzhou Dianzi University. The code was written in Node.js and the data is from an ORACLE database while some data structure is cached and managed in MongoDB. These are some of the very same technologies that Rocket.Chat relies on.It is because of Lucas' knowledge and experience as well as his clear enthusiasm at university that we are delighted he is involved. For him, his iOS development and Swift are what led him to the Rocket.Chat project iOS Live Chat SDK. He's been so keen that he has already made contributions for the Rocket.Chat iOS application earlier this year - a perfect fit for us!Lucas is clearly a huge fan of open source. He loves projects because it gives others the opportunity to become better programmers. "With the accessibility of open source codes, students can easily study and work on it." He believes source accessibility and allowing contributions means that time can be saved and then devoted to another development."Rocket.Chat stood out to Lucas because "the open source Slack-like chat app has gathered a lot of attention". He feels that the potential for development is far greater and therefore more interesting to him. The Live Chat SDK project in particular stood out because he would like to "dive deep" into working with iOS frameworks and runtime.For the summer project, Lucas will be using Swift as his programming language and Xcode as IDE; he explains that since there is no WebSocket playground that he can find, he will use Node.js as a scaffold to play with WebSocket APIs.Lucas has a wide variety of interests in computer programming such as machine learning, game making and the languages itself because "like human language, programming language almost has its own culture".We're sure he'll enjoy developing with us and be a great contributor this summer and, as we at Rocket.Chat hope, it will help him along in his career and passion.We will be documenting our students' progress over the summer: Check the Rocket.Chat blog, Facebook and Twitter. Or, see the Google Summer of Code documents section on the Rocket.Chat website.