In the past we would often treat a server as a machine which has a variety of roles. A single server may be responsible for serving web content, email, processing background jobs, and even hosting a database system. Your application is really only one of the many things that runs on that machine.
A common way to describe requirements on Agile projects is through the use of user story mapping, and, as a result, user stories. This post will not cover this process, but rather the process of taking an existing set of user stories and leveraging them within our development workflow to ensure that an application is built as accurately and efficiently as possible. To this effect, we will set up tools (Rails, RSpec, Capybara, FactoryGirl, and Guard, to be precise) for implementing our app using behavior-driven development. Structuring our app in this way gives us much better odds of producing robust, low-defect code that delivers on the requirements we set out to build.
I use Chrome extensions all the time and decided it was time to figure out how to make my own. I found it to be incredibly easy and I’d like to share with you some of the basics, as well as an example of an extension I made. Let’s get started!
I work from all over the place: Home, on public transit, the office, coffee shops, etc.
A big challenge to developing android apps in an environment where my laptop and phone are on different networks (wifi vs. LTE, or laptop tethered through phone) is the inability for my phone to see the API server that is often running locally on my laptop. Here is a simple tip to allow your phone to hit the backend over ADB and a usb cable.
To get a better handle on Erlang’s behavior, I decided to install a popular set of tools for debugging and performance profiling: EPER. I think it stands for “Erlang PERformance tools”, but it could also mean “Everything Proves Erlang Rules” or “Egrets Prefer to Eat Robots” or really anything for that matter. One thing is for certain, however: getting these tools built and running on Mac OS X was fraught with danger and build errors.
Graphic Processor Units are becoming more and more important in recent years and are spreading into many different fields, some of which include: computational finance, defense and intelligence, machine learning, fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, electronic biology, physics, chemistry, numerical analysis and security. There are many reasons why a person should learn how to write code for a GPU. For example, GPU’s have been used to successfully decrypt passwords (add reference) in record time, a 25-GPU cluster is able to crack any standard Windows password (95^8 combinations) in less than 6 hours. Other applications of the GPU include data mining for Bitcoin and also applying machine learning for sentimental analysis on tweets.
Positioning an element on a web page can be tricky. You can specify the position of an element using left, right, top and bottom properties. But these properties will not work if the position value is not properly set. The positioning properties also display differently depending on the positioning value.
While going through a set of configurations to connect on a remote machine I was asked to upload my public key and I realized that I didn’t really know what that was for. If you are asking yourself the same question, or need to convince your mom she can safely use her credit card online, here is brief summary of what’s going on behind the curtains.
In case you haven’t yet heard of it yet, Elixir is a functional programming language (technically, a collection of macros) written in Erlang. I have been persuaded to add it to my (and, consequently, Grio’s) technical repertoire due to a good amount of recent buzz in the blogosphere (as well as some points I’ll get to later). To make sure I have a strong foundation for my Elixir learning experience, I am starting my adventure with a foray into the underlying syntax of Erlang.
For the past year, I’ve been working mainly with AngularJS and before that Ruby on Rails. I’ve never heard of Meteor until a few weeks ago. I am intrigued by the idea of tightly connecting the client and server together in a synergistic manner that allows for fast responsiveness, which is what Meteor is all about. I decided to go through Meteor’s tutorial online and get a feel for why the framework differentiates itself from other current technologies. From a very high level perspective, Meteor is a very good solution for quickly building an application from the ground up and provides some cool features out of the box.