Category Archives: Misc

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January 26, 2016

Mastering the Art of Client Communication

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At some companies, designers and developers have little to no interaction with clients or customers. It’s not uncommon for the people working on a project to be walled off from clients by account managers or customer service. At Grio, every designer and developer is client facing, and everyone ends up doing some of the work that is traditionally done by an account manager, such as managing day to day contacts, relationship management, and responding to problems & issues.

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January 7, 2016

Late Subscribing and Polling APIs with RxAndroid

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Howdy, lazy bum! Enjoying the ReactiveX magic? Want to take a look at polling?

I’ll be walking you through a solution I put together for one of our up and coming apps! It works rather well, I learned a lot, and so far no complaints…although there are no users yet either!

Feeling quite charitable, I’m going to let you in on some useful bits and pieces as we build up to polling: threading, late subscribing, replay, manual re-triggering and error handling (a must for preserving replays).

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December 30, 2015

Prototyping with P5

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When I wanted to create a proof of a concept project for one of the game ideas I had, I found many tools and gaming frameworks. However, most of them had a steep learning curve which required a significant time investment before the game could be played. Then I discovered P5, a Javascript library inspired by the Processing language, which made it very easy to get started.

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December 15, 2015

Benchmarking Intel i5 & i7 Processors

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What is benchmarking?

Benchmarking is the process of measuring performance for a piece of technology against other pieces of technology. Typically, processors are benchmarked by running programs and software that heavily taxes the system. This allows the processor to truly shine (or, possibly, the opposite). For the purposes of this post, the i5 and i7 processors’ performance were measured in five different categories, each using one test:

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November 30, 2015

SQL & NOSQL: A Brief History

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The Relational Model & SQL

The relational model was proposed in a paper published in 1970 by Edgar Codd, a computer scientist working at IBM. In previous years, some storage systems had already emerged, but the relational model was first proposed with a strong theoretical basis.

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September 30, 2015

Content Delivery in P2P networks

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Scalability is a hot topic, especially in Content Delivery Networks (CDN) where scalability, robustness and availability are crucial. A CDN is a system that has the aim to deliver Web content, such as videos, images, and any other type, to end users. Content providers such as media companies need to deliver their content with high availability and high performance, and CDNs offer them the infrastructure to do it. There are different approaches, each one with its advantages and flaws.

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September 24, 2015

An Introduction to Elliptic Curve Cryptography: With Math!

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Modern cryptography is a very murky subject for many people, so today I will try to explain to you one of the more complex subjects, Elliptic Curves. Many of you may have heard their name before, but likely don’t know much about them beyond that. To begin, I will describe what an elliptic curve is.

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September 10, 2015

Intro to Software Methodologies

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Software Engineering is about more than just writing code. It is a complex process that has a lot of moving parts. Requirements gathering, planning, testing, deployment and source control management are just a few of the pieces to the software engineering puzzle. So how do we manage all this complexity? Software methodologies come to the rescue.

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August 13, 2015

Chrome Extension Basics

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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!

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