our notebook

Meet Matt Patterson (mattpatt), an Infinity developer, and an improviser in music and thought. A man who loves jazz, a good burger, and Larry David!

Name, Company, Title, City

Matt Patterson, Infinity Interactive, Junior Developer, Central Virginia

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Meet Trey Bianchini, Infinity developer who, in his spare time likes to make really good espresso and also, electric guitars.

Name, Company, Title, City

Trey Bianchini, Infinity Interactive, Programmer, Omaha, NE

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In this latest post in our interview series, we’d like to introduce you to our own John Bowser, programmer, nature lover, cat guy.

Name, Company, Title, City

John Bowser, Infinity Interactive, Junior Developer, Salt Lake City, UT

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We recently were a part of a project with what was, in many ways, a typical successful startup. The company makes hardware for a niche market, powered by their own firmware and driven by a suite of web applications running both on a server and locally as Electron apps. They make a great product that is disrupting the space and they’re growing rapidly, both in company size and number of users.

What started as a small integrated team has spun up to several groups overseeing various aspects of the product and as that happened the developers became somewhat siloed from the QA folks. Each group had its own process for keeping the quality high in the face of rapid growth, namely thorough unit tests on the development side and a series of step-by-step documents used by a number of testers to manually go through every page and every button of the web applications. Releases were coming quickly and the testers were spending hours upon hours methodically testing only to have to start all over again when another release came out of development. They were overworked and almost overwhelmed, and called Infinity for help.

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Here at Infinity, one of our core precepts — coined by former Infin-ite Shawn Moore — is the notion that “tickets are free”. The idea is that you should never waste time wondering “should I make a ticket for this?” Instead, just make the damn ticket! In the immortal words of John Blutarsky, “it don’t cost nuthin’.”

With an opening paragraph like that, you’re probably expecting some sort of listicle of all the ways adopting our “tickets are free” credo will help make your software development efforts better and turbocharge your coders to new heights of productivity. That is not what you’re gonna get, however. Nope! Instead, I’m going to talk to you about how tickets are free… because they’re not free like beer, but instead are free like puppies. And then I’ll share ways to make sure your freely created tickets are usefully propelling your project forward, instead of bogging it down.

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With an estimated 3.2 billion smartphone users in 2019, the mobile app industry is growing and not showing any signs of slowing down. Along with this growth in smartphone usage comes increased demands and expectations from end users. Apps need to use the latest smartphone features, be fast & easy to use. This is further complicated with the need to develop for both Android and Apple smartphones as well as tablets. For someone with an app idea, considering all these factors can be a bit overwhelming. This is where Infinity Interactive steps in. Infinity has extensive experience in the mobile app arena and can help you identify the best approach for your app and target audience. Today, companies are not just restricted to developing a native mobile app. They can also build mobile web apps, progressive web apps, and cross-platform apps. This post will cover the pros and cons of each with the hope of giving a clear path for taking an app idea into app reality.

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At Infinity, we’ve been a fully remote, on-shore tech consultancy and custom software development company since 2005 (founded in 1998), so a lot of our friends and contacts have been asking us for advice on effectively managing remote co-working. We thought it would be helpful to share some of our tips and tricks from both the leadership and employee perspectives.

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Even on mobile, sometimes you need to show people a PDF. In your Xamarin Android app, for most situations, having the user download the document to view it outside of the app using Android's native document viewer is probably fine. But what if the design specifies displaying the document in the app? And what if that document is 100+ pages long? We recently ran into this here at Infinity Interactive and needless to say, displaying a PDF in your Xamarin Android app is not as straightforward as one might expect.

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In the beginning, there were iOS, Android, and the Web. Entirely separate platforms that had to be developed as such.

Then, along came Xamarin. Developers could write iOS and Android apps using a single codebase, but we were still on our own for Web development.

Now, Uno has emerged. Building on top of Xamarin, it gives us the power to write iOS, Android, Web, and even UWP applications using shared logic and UI!

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Cloud functions are a great way to run small programmatic services in the cloud. They are easy to create and use, are very secure, and need little maintenance. They even scale on-demand in a way that is very difficult to achieve using regular servers.

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