Mentoring Future Engineers
The mission: create a robot in six weeks. The challenge: complete on time, under budget, and with a team who may not know one another. Sound familiar?
Art+Logic at SXSW Interactive 2017
Once again, Art & Logic will have representatives from our development, recruiting, and sales/marketing groups attending the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas from March 10th – 14th. We’d love to meet with anyone there who’s interested in talking about a software development project or opportunities for software developers & designers at A&L.
A Quick Core Data Stack with NSPersistentContainer
One of the longstanding criticisms of Core Data is how much code it takes to setup the infamous Core Data stack in your iOS or macOS app just so that you can create some instances of entities and save them to a persistent store. The frustration has spawned a number of blog posts outlining the latest, greatest way to setup your stack. Not long after the blog posts came the open source projects aimed at reducing the amount of boilerplate you’ve got to write and helping you avoid common mistakes.
With the release of iOS 10 and macOS 10.12 in many cases you can now forget about the blog posts and third party dependencies thanks to NSPersistentContainer. This one is a no-brainer and it would have been nice if Apple had included it back in the days of iOS 3.0 when they introduced Core Data.
Cloudy with a Chance of VMs: Scaling Up & Out with Azure
Many undocumented subtleties figure prominently when designing and scaling the Azure architecture of a new Azure Web App, whether starting from scratch or porting an existing .NET app to the Azure Cloud. It’s always best to determine system compatibilities and custom needs prior to deployment. While Microsoft’s Azure documentation is generally good, navigating the often undocumented details can prevent pitfalls and optimize the scalability of your Azure Cloud-based solution.
Save Time & Energy with libcompression
In iOS 9 and macOS 10.11 Apple introduced the libcompression APIs to provide a more standard way of compressing and decompressing data in your apps while offering a selection of algorithms with tradeoffs between compression efficiency, time, and energy requirements. In the past I’ve used third party APIs to compress or decompress ZIP archives given the popularity of the format, but hadn’t considered using other algorithms to either benefit from better compression or energy efficiency. Given that, I decided to take a look at the algorithms offered by libcompression and see how they compare.
Downloading Client-side Generated Content
A young developer, new to the Tao of the client-side, comes to a Master of the way, and speaks thusly: “Oh Master, our application nears completion; and lo, cat pics can be drawn upon, and captions fixated thereto, for the creation of humour and the bounteous enjoyment of our users.”
“This is good,” responded the Master.