Weekly digest - 2018.12

Weekly digest - 2018.12

This week was mostly about Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. Long story short, Cambridge had copies of private data for about 50 million Facebook users. Cambridge supposed to delete that data in 2015. What is even more interesting the Cambridge Analytica was involved in Donald Trump's presidential campaign which could influence the outcome of presidential election.
One thing is sure, Facebook will have to explain why Cambridge Analytica still had access to users data and how much Facebook actually care about user privacy.

On the bright side, the GDC 2018 took place. It is mostly about sessions, but we got a few cool technical demonstrations like Real-Time Ray Tracing Star Wars Demo or digital human performances from Siren and Andy Serkins.

Also Apple fixed buggy iPhone X ad before fixing the actual iOS 11 bug. This perfectly shows current mindset of Apple - lets fix the glitch in the ad instead of actual bug.

And finally, here is the list of interesting articles.

Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
This is really interesting paper about how Windows 95 user interface evolved and came to life. I must admit i felt nostalgic after reading it.

The most powerful tips to help you get a remote job
If you are a remote worker or you want to become one then this article is for you.

A complete introduction to Apollo, the GraphQL toolkit
GraphQL is getting more and more popular. And it looks like, it is just the matter of time that it will become more popular than REST. This article explains the basics, so if you never used GraphQL or Apollo before, you should check this out.

iOS Subscriptions are Hard
Jacob explains how to properly implement subscription mechanism in iOS app.

How to make a poster for Avengers: Infinity War in HTML and CSS
This is tutorial explains how to create cool looking website using just HTML and CSS.

The secret world of NSTimer
Nice explanation of inner workings of NSTimer.


Image credits: Facebook.

Weekly digest - 2018.07

Weekly digest - 2018.07

This week Apple released its new product - HomePod. It is a smartspeaker and costs 350$. Is it worth it? Well, it is hard to say because it is not available in Poland, but you can check out what others think here or here.

Staying on Apple related news. It looks like Apple is going to focus on bugs instead of adding new features to iOS 12. If those rumors are true, I can say only one thing - finally, Steven Sinofsky explained why.

Last week Falcon Heavy launch made a lot of fuss in the media. Thanks to this launch people starts to understand why SpaceX is doing thing the way it does.

And here is the list of interesting articles I stumble upon this week.

12 best practices for user account, authorization and password management
User authorization is hard. From this article you will learn how to do it properly so your users passwords doesn't leak.

30+ great UI Kits for iOS engineers
Lisa compiled a list of over 30 UI Kits for designers. This is a must read for every one who is doing mobile app desings.

3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae: Enjoy this Doom.xls file!
Someone wrote Doom like game engine in MS Excel because why not. Defenetly worth checking out.


Image credits: Apple.

Weekly digest - 2018.06

Weekly digest - 2018.06

Finally, after years of designing and building, SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy into space. The world's most powerful rocket took the Starman in a red Tesla in space while twin boosters landed near the launch site in Florida giving us unforgettable spectacle.
Although the mission achieved its primary goal - putting a cargo on its way to Mars, it wasn't fully successful. While the two side boosters landed simultaneously on the ground, the core one crashed into the ocean. At the moment, it looks like the booster was approaching the landing barge too fast and missed it by couple meters.
Despite this malfunction, we are one step closer from landing on Mars.

Lucasfilm released teaser trailer for upcoming Solo: A Star Wars Story. Despite all the fuss with switching directors in the middle of production, the movie seems to be good and interesting.

And now it's time for the list of interesting things I stumble upon this week.

Apple's Emoji Crackdown
Apple started rejecting iOS apps that use emojis in different places than text fields. I understand that Apple does own the copyright to its emoji font, but rejecting creative and good looking apps because they use emoji instead of normal words is the way to make developers go away from the platform.

Swift 4.1 improves Codable with keyDecodingStrategy
Swift came a long and bumpy road. I still remember how hard it was to parse JSON when Swift came out in 2014. In this article Paul Hadson give us a glimpse into the future and explains how easy it will be to parse JSON with Swift 4.1.

CloudKit: Structured Storage for Mobile Applications
This white paper gives the behind the scenes look into Apple's CloudKit.

PodsUpdater
Every iOS developer must heard of CocoaPods. Those who use it know that managing dependencies is difficult. This app makes our life a little bit easier.

Building .NET Core 2.0 web apps with Vue.js single file components using VS Code
Adam Marczak shows how to integrate Vue.js with Asp.NET Core 2.0


Image credits: SpaceX.

Weekly digest - 2018.04

Weekly digest - 2018.04

After busy begining of the year the last week of Junary was calm. I would even risk to say it was boring.
Cryptocurencies are still falling, but on the bright side, Space X finally performed static fire test of Falcon Heavy. Now we are waiting for launch, which is planned for 6th of February.

Beside this nothing much happend so let go stright to list of interesting articles.

Rest confusion explained
Follow up to the very popular and controversial Rest is the new SOAP article.

I am a 9-5 developer and so can you
We programmers spend to much time on coding. We love it, but we also need to know when to stop. In this article Matthew Jones explains how to reconcile private and professional life.

EA scared of youtubers
Recent events showed that gamers have enough of EA's bad practices. It looks like that EA is now scared of the opinions of prominent Youtubers.

How one person caused the price of cryptocurrencies to fall
It looks like, once again, lack of communication caused a catastrophe.

PWAs are coming to iOS 11.3: Cupertino, we have a problem
Apple added Service Workers to iOS 11.3. Those allow programmers to create Progressive Web Apps.

Why I left Google to join Grab
This article might seems to be another rant about "evil" Google, but actually it shows interesting point of view, where Google stopped to be innovative.

HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons
If you ever wonder how HTTPS works, here is human friendly explanation.

Create Guten Block Toolkit
This is zero-configuration dev-toolkit for developing WordPress Gutenberg blocks. Although it is a tool dedicated to WordPress, it has some interesting ideas that have a great chance of being adopted in other projects.

Codable enums in Swift
This article explains how to encode and decode enums with associated types.

Whopper Neutrality
This is brilliant. Burger King shows to ordinary people what is Net Neutrality.

Magnetic USB-C cable
If you're missing magsafe in new MacBooks, this is something that might interest you.


Image credits: SpaceX.