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April 12, 2017

Esoteric Programming Languages and You!

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Have you ever heard the term “esoteric programming language” and not known exactly what it was referring to? If so, this blog is for you, and hopefully an entertaining jaunt if not.

Esoteric programming languages are a unique class of programming languages that are generally NOT designed for everyday use on projects such as a website or phone app. Instead,
they are designed with a goal in mind, such as being a difficult as possible to program in, or to layout the code into a physical space that has meaning. Amusingly enough, even though they are often rather crazy, they also tend to be Turing complete which is quite impressive considering they weren’t necessarily designed with that goal in mind.

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March 27, 2017

Meet Kotlin

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Kotlin is a JVM language that hit version 1.0 about a year ago (February 2016).
It is developed by JetBrains, the same people who make my favorite suite of
IDEs. The language itself is open-source under the Apache License 2.0 and is
developed as a community project over at kotlinlang.org. Kotlin is something
that I have become rather excited about over the past year. This post’s goal is
not to teach you Kotlin but to get you excited about it!

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March 20, 2017

An Introduction to Machine Learning

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Machine learning (a field of artificial intelligence) is a rapidly expanding technology that we see  in use more and more in our daily lives. It is used to give us more accurate results when we do an internet search, suggest products to us when we are shopping, and offer diagnoses to our maladies.

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March 1, 2017

Developing for Web Accessibility

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HTML 5 represented in American Sign Language

When developing websites it is important to consider your audience and how they interact with your application. This can be even more significant for a person with disabilities. Even the most stunning visual presentation can lose its value when the content cannot be interpreted by an individual due to, for example, a learning disability or difficulty seeing. Therefore, it is important, when doing any development or design, we do not dismiss the 1 in 5 people that would benefit on an accessible web.

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February 21, 2017

Design Synthesis: What it is and How to Apply it to a Design Process

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Design Synthesis

The Magical Part of Design

There has been a few occasions over the course of my design career when I’m asked how I come up with a design solution and know it’s the right one. I’ve never had a satisfactory answer for this because it’s too complex to explain succinctly, so I usually answer with something as simple as “creativity and validation,” which is not far off the mark, but rather vague. A better answer, at least in the context of product, software, and website design is synthesis, which is the magical part of design that uses insights from data to generate epiphanies and inform design decisions.

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February 21, 2017

The Importance of Onboarding Processes

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Being a new hire can be overwhelming in more ways than one. Meeting new people, learning how the company operates and how to become a successful member of the team.

In order to make this transition smoother, an onboarding process can be put into action. Going through this process typically happens once during the course of employment, beginning at the time of hire. Over time, faces become familiar and the day to day tasks become more routine, minimizing the unknown.

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February 12, 2017

REST API Models in Swift

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There are a lot of APIs out there, a lot of networking layers, a lot of abstractions, I’m going to offer just one way to start building Swift models backed by a RESTful API. Out of personal preference, PromiseKit will be used instead of callbacks and ObjectMapper will be used to convert between JSON and Swift objects.

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January 17, 2017

Look Ma, No Hands!

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While we may not be seeing a DeLorean turned time machine anytime soon, a vehicle with capabilities similar to those of KITT from Knight Rider isn’t so far fetched.

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January 6, 2017

Hottest Social Media Platforms in China

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You might think that Facebook and Twitter are already occupying the social media space world wide,  However, in China they are blocked. When it comes to Social Media Marketing in China, you must use different tones to communicate with your Chinese audience on their own Social Media platforms, such as Weibo (equivalent of Facebook and Twitter in China), especially Sina Weibo, Tencent Qzone (equivalent of Facebook and Twitter in China), Tencent QQ (Instant Message tools), Tencent Wechat (Mobile communication and private social networking app), Renren (equivalent of Facebook in China) and Youku & Tudou (equivalent of YouTube in China).

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December 5, 2016

What is Pixel Density and Why Should You Care?

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Pixel density is the number of pixels per linear physical unit. Measured in pixels per inch (ppi or dpi). Pixel density and resolution are technically the same thing, but often people say “resolution” to mean “pixel count,” a related metric:

count = densityH * width * densityV * height

When other things are held constant:

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