code and science (but mostly code)
When I travel to see friends or colleagues, I often receive gasps of surprise at how lightly I've packed. Here are some of the ways I pull it off. 1. Interchangeable wardrobe components When packing clothes, I try not to think in terms of 'outfits' and instead in terms of groups of things that… Continue reading 7 ways to pack lighter
In the course of building apps for clients, I often work with some fantastic UX/UI designers. At least one of them, I've noticed, does something that seems both familiar and unfamiliar to software developers: she has a series of common screens that many apps use and customizes those to the needs of the client. Now,… Continue reading The Dream: Reusing UX Flows
Want to skip to the part where you can help? Sign up here! Like many, I was distraught after the 2016 election. I felt lost, and I didn't know where to begin to try to stop the massive trainwreck our country was heading towards. How could I use my particular skills to make a change?… Continue reading AskNot: an App for Amplifying Liberal Messages
Mobile app developers know that users have to be prompted to take actions like rating your app, upgrading, and other such activities. However, it's really important not to be annoying about it, or your users will just uninstall (plus everyone hates being nagged incessantly!). With this in mind, I built a simple Swift cocoapod to… Continue reading Nagging Users to Take Action
As a mobile developer, I routinely work with JSON from APIs. Going from a JSON dictionary to a model object is something I do for just about every screen I build. On Android, I use a wonderful library called Gson which (more or less) automatically take JSON and populates a model object with the data.… Continue reading Convenient iOS JSON Parsing with Eson
At Habitica, Phillip Thelen, Keith Holliday, and I have been talking about removing RestKit and replacing it with several other smaller libraries instead (like Realm, Alamofire, and SwiftyJSON, to name a few). That, in combination with some conversations I've had with Brandon Williams about functional programming, have lead me to create a simple scaffolding for… Continue reading Applying SOLID Principles and Functional Patterns to iOS Networking
There's been a lot of breathless news coverage of the recent vote allowing ISPs to continue selling your web browsing history. While it's definitely a Bad Thing™, there are a lot of other things that are at least as bad when it comes to your privacy online. If you're worried about advertisers knowing too much about… Continue reading 3 easy ways to improve your digital privacy in 5 minutes or less
Imagine you have a simple, straightforward, yes/no question, and you decide to ask a friend of yours. The first time you ask, your friend says no, but maybe yes later. Perplexed, you ask again, and your friend says yes, definitely. You ask a third time, and they tell you that you're not asking a question at all,… Continue reading How one app got three different responses from Apple
Just use adb! Super simple to hook up your phone to your computer, navigate to the adb folder and execute: adb shell screenrecord /sdcard/FILENAME.mp4
In Raspberry Pi as a Television Remote: Part 1, we covered how to put together the hardware for this project, including a Raspberry Pi protoboard and LED emitters/receivers. Now, we're going to put them to use. As in the previous part, I'll be covering how my setup differs from Alex Bain's Open Source Universal Remote… Continue reading Raspberry Pi as a Television Remote: Part 2
