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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About seven months ago, I started practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a grappling
art founded in Brazil. Immediately after, I began comparing everything to it.
My kids started making fun of me: “Everything is Jiu-Jitsu for you, Dada.” And,
they were right. If I was reading, I’d say, “I’m grappling with the book.” If I
was cooking, I’d say, “I’m Jiu-Jitsuing food.” If my five-year-old daughter
asked me to help her cut her food during dinner, I’d say, “Just Jiu-Jitsu it.
Pin it down with your fork so it won’t move. Then, cut it.”
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Here at Infinity Interactive, we are an entirely remote team. As such,
high availability of our communication tools is paramount to our
success. Our daily methods of communication include JIRA, email,
commit messages, and even, gasp, telephones. While these are
effective at doing their job, they are not a replacement for that
“human” feel you get when you go into an office and have the ability
to have group and individual conversations with your co-workers. For
that piece of the puzzle, we use Slack.
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System monitoring. A pretty vital part of any network management.
That is, unless you're one of the few who live for the visceral thrill
of flying blind. For the rest of us partial to our lack of heart condition,
an ounce of prevention is worth ten thousand gallons of Saturday morning
intervention.
In this blog entry, I'll go through the exercise of putting
together a simple but working and easily
extensible system monitoring setup leveraging common pieces of technology.
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In an ecosystem riddled with large, portentous frameworks,
Redux is a refreshingly ascetic
little store management system. Driven more by its functional
programming-inspired tenets than supporting code, it offers — and
needs — only a few helper functions to manage its stores.
Minimalism is good. It's also a good idea to abstract oft-used
patterns into more expressive forms. Ideally, code should be crafted
such that its intent comes out on first read, while making deeper digs
possible when required.
Happily enough, the judicious use of delightfully succinct
higher-order functions is often all that's required to tailor-suit
some ergonomics into the manipulation of middleware and reducers. This
blog entry will showcase some of those helper functions that work for
me.
This article assumes you're already familiar with Redux. If this isn't
the case, you might want to check out first one of my
previous articles,
which provides a gentler, if a tad unconventional, introduction to the
framework.
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Yesterday marked our 20th anniversary.
It’s been an awesome ride and we’re grateful for the opportunity to
have enjoyed every moment with so many wonderful partners, clients,
and colleagues. This weekend, I had an opportunity to spend a few
minutes to sit back and reflect on the experiences of the past twenty
years as well as the path forward to the next twenty.
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JSON Schema is a neat way to describe or
prescribe structural expectations of JSON documents (or, indeed, any
data structure, let it be a JavaScript plain object or the equivalent
in another language). But JSON schemas are themselves JSON documents
and, while machines love a good ol’ JSON format, let’s face it: for us
humans it’s a lengthy, picky, and mildly onerous format to write and
read.
Fortunately, there are many ways to craft JSON schemas while
circumventing most of its JSON-born tediousness. Let me show you a few
of them.
…read more
