State on the front-end

A few days ago I clicked on the thumbs-up icon on a GitHub issue, yet nothing happened. An old, dark feeling rose up again. Depression came and pointed out that I couldn’t go a day without a program malfunctioning. I hate computers. And then suddenly the number on the screen changed! I felt relieved and continued with my day.

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Elixir: the new kid in town

We love Ruby. We have enough experience with Ruby and web software development. But something that we love even more is being up to date. We are always trying new libraries, frameworks, designs and languages too. We like to get our own experience, contribute to as many open source projects we can. This is something that we enjoy, individually and as a team. It is part of the company’s culture.

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Microservices 101

When we think about building an application, we visualize it as a bunch of code glued together, running somewhere on the web for the purpose of providing people some value. It could be the homepage of your coffee shop, an e-commerce site or an amazing API which collects data from your watch.

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Performance optimizations: Why, When and How

When developing software, there eventually comes a time when the team needs to start thinking about performance. Ideally this is done on a daily basis - most developers try to balance productivity, code readability and shipping features. But at some point of the life cycle of the application, the need to optimize for performance becomes evident.

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Indoor positioning with beacons and mobile devices

Imagine you arrive at an airport for the first time and you are in a hurry to find the gate; or you’re in a museum and are interested in a specific section; or you’re about to meet someone in a big hall but have no idea how to give indications to each other about where to meet: Indoor positioning to the rescue.

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Validating Models With Ruby

Most ORMs out there include model validations as part of the features they provide. I think that’s kind of cool and very useful, but sometimes it’s better to abstract that responsibility away from the model, especially in cases where validations are tightly tied to other factors or flows.

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Tired of conditionals? State pattern could help

When writing code, our classes often go through a series of transformations. What starts out as a simple class will grow as behavior is added. And if you didn’t take the necessary precautions, your code will become difficult to understand and maintain. Too often, the state of an object is kept by creating multiple boolean attributes and deciding how to behave based on the values. This can become cumbersome and difficult to maintain when the complexity of your class starts to increase.

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Is Swift production ready?

I began working on an iOS app called Healthy Baby at the end of 2014. At the time Swift 1.0 was already released and Apple was iterating on it rapidly, adding features and also changing the syntax of the language with each release of the SDK. It looked like the perfect time to start a new Swift project.

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Announcing AT&T M2X: An Industrial Grade IoT Platform for Everyone

We believe in the not-too-distant future your home will know if it should save power by turning off the lights and lowering the heat because you are away on a business trip. We believe that your cars engine will start to warm up for you as soon as your thumb touches the handle on your front door. We believe you and your family will be protected from danger with smarter smoke detectors powering a more responsive fire department and providing a wealth of air quality data to more informed parents. But most importantly: we believe our ideas about what might happen pale in comparison to the explosion of creativity and genius that the product design and development community will unleash.

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Motion detection with Raspberry PI

Motion detection is a tricky problem to solve, the key is to balance sensitivity so that it doesn’t catch light changes but still catches movements in the frame. In this article I will describe 2 methods to achieve motion detection: calculating frame differences manually and harnessing the power of the H.264 encoder. Finally, we’ll store the results online using using a connected devices (Internet-of-Things) platform from AT&T.

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A Practical CSS Styleguide

Frontend work is usually a rather messy job if things are not organized properly from the start. A CSS styleguide is a useful tool for establishing common criteria for the team, in terms of both CSS coding syntax and CSS architecture.

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Extending Xcode 6 with plugins

Xcode has a comprehensive SDK that provides everything you need to create beautiful, interactive applications. However, due to its closed-source codebase and no official support for extension hooks it falls short in the realm of social and community supported code. It lacks the flexibility that allows the community to grow and feel at home by adapting and maintaining their own code and tools.

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