Category: Software Development
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Designing the Apple Watch UI – a quick guide
The Apple Watch is releasing in a month! Here’s a list of important things you need to know, if you’re interested in designing or developing an Apple Watch App: 1. Layout and Screen Sizes 38mm: 340 pixels x 272 pixels 42mm: 390 pixels x 312 pixels That’s an aspect ratio of 4:5. 2. Icon…
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Php’s performance improvements — HHVM, JIT, and ‘Hack’
Facebook deprecated HipHop for PHP, a PHP to C++ translator (trans-compiler) which they had been using since Feb 2010 in favour of HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), in 2013. HHVM is a PHP interpreter that uses just-in-time(JIT) compilation techniques. Or to put it another way, HHVM is a virtual machine that compiles PHP bytecode to native instructions at runtime. HHVM now…
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Native Vs Hybrid Mobile Apps
I was recently checking how the Hybrid App frameworks compare to Native iOS or Android Apps. Here are my observations on few Phonegap Apps that I tried on my phone: The size of Phonegap Apps is big: an app that should have been less than 10MB has a 40-50MB installer. The Apps take longer to…
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github is not git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system that can handle small to very large projects. It’s mostly used to keep the history of your source code. Github is a company that provides an online git hosting service, used by some projects to keep their source code. There are several companies like…
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Navigating large codebases and contributing to Open Source
(I wrote the following as an email to a someone who asked me for advice. So it’s verbose and written with a personal tone.) I. Setup your system and build the project code Pick any good Integrated Development Environment (IDE). I like VS Code. You can work on any langauge in VSCode be it C++,…
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Python for beginners
Getting functional in Python programming took me about a month and I’ve several years of C++ programming experience. I feel this is ok time for experienced programmers to get started, given you have something else going on in life as well. For beginners though, learning a new programming language in a useful manner is not…
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“Language X for Y developer” tutorials are useless
The idea of the polyglot/full-stack developer is pushing all the web developers to continually learn new languages and you might come across a few tutorials on the lines of ‘Python for C++ programmers’ or ‘Go for Java developers’. I don’t think these tutorials are the best way to pick a new language. The premise of…