Dodgy Coder

This article summarizes the important factors involved when deciding between the two leading cross platform mobile development frameworks of Google's Flutter and Facebook's React Native.FlutterAdvantages✅ It can design complex UIs which are standardized across Android & iOS resulting in less platform dependent bugs.✅ Easier to learn for existing...

The below is taken from an interview conducted at the Computer History Museum in 2004 by Grady Booch. He interviewed early Apple developers Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld about the development of the original Apple Mac, and in particular MacPaint software.On the art of developing softwareGrady Booch: So what makes software beautiful for you? Do...

Starting outWhen you're starting out your career as a software developer, you'll typically get a first role as either a backend or frontend dev, and after a couple of years, gain some experience on the other side to become a full stack developer.Company specific lock inSince every organisation has its own tech stack, a full stack developer in...

Within the .NET ecosystem, two ORMs dominate, the lightweight Dapper (open source) and the fully featured Entity Framework (EF) by Microsoft. Depending on your project's size and requirements, either of these should work well for you, but there are definitely some known cases where each is a better fit. That's what we're discussing in this...

A classic black swan event has just happened to the LUNA cryptocurrency.A black swan event is characterised by a spectacular run up in price, followed by the price falling off a cliff to near zero. It famously happened to a hedge fund named LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) back in 1998. The resulting loss temporarily destabilised Wall Street,...

Nootropics are a popular new type of dietary supplement that claim to enhance brain function in a number of ways including better memory, sharper thinking, alertness, improved verbal ability, more clarity and the elimination of 'brain fog'.I started looking into some options available that deliver to Australia and came across this brand called...

The InMotion S1 electric scooter. At the front is my wife's scooter, the VSETT 8.Electric kickscooters are really popular right now. Their sweet spot in terms of usefulness is probably for people living in urban and inner city areas, or in areas which have good bicycle paths. I live in an inner city suburb of Perth, Western Australia, and work...

Yes, Xamarin owes its existence to two other bits of technology that were huge around 2008 - the Unity Game Engine and the iPhone. The reason is that a confluence of events around 2008 provided the push to get the Mono project into mobile app development. This resulted in MonoTouch (for iOS) and Mono for Android, which eventually became Xamarin...

A circuit breaker can help you improve the stability of your application by protecting calls to third party services; e.g. a web service, a network resource, a database, or any other component which can intermittently fail. Its a fundamental pattern for protecting your system from all manner of integration point problems. It is a way to fail...

and deploying it with MetaMask and MyEtherWallet (MEW) Introduction Ethereum has a vast amount of developer resources available, such that for a beginner its hard to know where to start. If you go with the recommended approach you'd probably choose Solidity along with either JavaScript or golang. JavaScript and golang are traditionally the most...

The NBitcoin library is the most active and well supported library in .NET for working with Bitcoin and other similar cryptocurrencies. NBitcoin fully supports Bitcoin Cash (BCH), however the ebook and programming guide examples focus solely on Bitcoin Core (BTC). The problem you encounter when following the NBitcoin guide is firstly that the...

A counter overflow bug happens when an unsigned integer variable storing a counter reaches its maximum value; when its already at the maximum, as soon as one more value gets added to it, the variable will reset back to 0 and continue counting up from there. If the rest of the software is not expecting this counter reset, it can result in system...

I setup this online shop over a couple of weekends - Chow Slow - Slow Feeder Dog Bowls. After launch I continued to make various improvements and optimisations to the presentation and content of the site. Since launch three months ago, the online shop has so far taken 72 orders.The eCommerce SaaS product Shopify was used to build the site, on the...

This article applies mainly to mobile apps which are not in active development. It applies equally to mobile apps on the public app stores and also to enterprise mobile apps which get distributed via other means (such as MDM software). Example scenario of an inactive/failing app: The active marketing of your app that happened at launch has now...

Many hobbyist IoT projects running on the Raspberry Pi (RPi) require a webserver running on the RPi which receives requests from a browser, where the client using the browser is connected either to the local WiFi network, or possibly (via a port forwarding setup), connected to the public Internet. An alternative that is easy to setup, lightweight...

The below steps go through setting up a custom domain name on your Azure Web App, using the FreeDNS service from NameCheap. Both the www subdomain www.yourdomainhere.com and the naked yourdomainhere.com will be setup. I have an Azure S1 Small Instance App Service Plan on which I'm running 4 web apps. Originally I had planned to use Azure DNS, to...

Low cost airlines are the masters of dynamic pricing, bundling and pricing psychology. Every customer who makes an online booking presents them with some new data to plug into their dynamic pricing algorithm. They also analyse the best way to present the various upgrades available to purchase before the final checkout, to maximise the customer's...

Software installation best practicesWhen you've got critical settings files that absolutely should never be overwritten or cleared back to defaults, this pattern has always worked well for me. It can apply to both Windows, Linux and Mac based software.The installation method can either be a simple file copy utility/archive or something more...

In 2014, Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing formed the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, a crowdfunded effort to attempt to gain control of the decommissioned spacecraft for the benefit of citizen science. The team raised almost $160,000 in funding and assembled top space experts for the cause. In May, 2014, they began communicating with the spacecraft in...

I have written an Android app that communicates to my Raspberry Pi over SSH (using JSch) but the issue is that in the App the IP address of my Raspberry Pi has been hardcoded at 192.168.1.109 - ideally it would be good to be able to give it a local name, something like garagedoor.local - something that won't change when the DHCP assigns a...

Just came across this today. Previously had heard the association with the musical sharp symbol (#) to mean a pitch higher in tone, but this was the first time I'd heard that the # symbol can also be seen as a matrix of four small + symbols, hence C# stands for C++++, i.e. an increment to C++. Source:...

Back in 2001 Microsoft Windows had 90% of the worldwide OS market for PCs. But desktop windows software development was dire. Developers were using tools like ... Visual Basic 6 - very productive, with the downside of ugly, primitive syntax, lacking modern features such as interfaces and classes. Visual C++/MFC - serious windows developers were...

Here's a quick checklist of the free software I usually install on new Windows machines ... Browser: Firefox - still the best browser in my opinion, with a wealth of developer tools. Chrome is also good but I found it to be prone to crashing, so gave up on it. After installing Firefox, I remove the Internet Explorer link on the task bar. Email:...

A step by step guide, including: Gigabyte Brix hardware setup. Preparing the Windows 7 installer USB boot drive. Installing Windows 7 (64 bit). Installing the Gigabyte Brix drivers. BRIX PRODUCT DETAILS GB-BXBT-2807 (rev. 1.0) Intel® Celeron Processor N2807 (2 core) running at up to 2.17...

Thanks to Harry Brignull from Dark Patterns for bringing up the interesting topic of evil user interfaces; UIs designed to trick you into spending more money, or buying a product you don't want. Here's the best example from their slidedeck - the Ryanair booking form. I've added some explanatory comments below each screenshot. 1. Ryanair home...

After installing the Google Play Music app, the first screen allows you to choose which Google account to associate with it. Seems straightforward enough; but have a look at the screen - what you would press? Looks like there's a choice of two commands, either Add account or Not now. But there's another command there ... the email address is a...