In my recent day-to-day work, I don't come into much contact with writing vanilla iOS apps directly. Despite being quite knowledgable in mobile app development, and the Swift programming language, I don't use these skills often. For this reason, I often in spare time (such as waiting at airports) write small apps, and review tutorials for using the latest advancements in programming languages like Swift, and the associated tooling like Xcode. Read more...

With trends moving to Serverless or Function-as-a-Service we've started building our web servers from instances of Express running inside Docker containers, to "functions" that instead run on managed infrastructure, responding to each request as they arrive. Many cloud providers supply this type of system which is fast, cheap, and very easy to maintain as all you have to do is upload your functions. Cloudflare in particular innovate further by replicating your worker to every edge node in their network, drastically limiting CPU + memory time, in exchange for response time as each worker 'instance' is located physically close to users. With previous approaches, worker instances were usually just located in a single region with redundant zones only; thus requiring a load balancer to be setup which is also not simple. Read more...

This is an inline tool that, when used in a Continuous Deployment workflow can automatically generate full featured release notes when run as a Docker mounted command In particular, it is useful for Webpack build JavaScript projects that have outputted a stats file, as this tool is able to consume the data, and integrate relevant parts of it into the final release notes. The full release notes, and formatted bundle information relating to the Webpack build, are uploaded to GitHub and created as a release on the commit that generate it. It's able to compare the last prior release with the current one, and highlight important performance information, such as changes in the number of bundles, their chunk names, and their respective sizes; which are all relevant if you want to maintain an ongoing trend of light client releases. Read more...

2016 generation MacBooks and iPhones have a wide-gamut P3 display that show 25% 'more' red and greens compared to standard RGB monitors. So I began to experiment to work out what was needed to be able to use this extra color space when presenting images on web and native apps.Basically what I needed to work out was, when given an image that is using P3 color space, can I make a thumbnail from it without destroying the P3 colors and output a transformed image that is still in P3. Further that, to be able to display the specific P3 optimised images on devices that support it. Read more...

Sometimes the best way to learn something is to study each component separately, this gives us a true in depth skill on how something specific works. However, putting these components together to make a full featured application is another ball game entirely. I've always maintained that Software Engineering isn't difficult, but it can be complicated - as a typical application will consume numerous different technologies from development stages, to deployment, to runtime. It's putting all these modules together that is the hard part. Read more...