Technology blog

Jak przebadać sporą liczbę użytkowników i zrobić to w niestandardowy sposób? Można na przykład zorganizować 5 dniowe wydarzenie badawcze w kilku miejscowościach nad morzem i zaangażować do testowania serwisu plażowiczów z całej Polski! Podczas PracujSurf (o idei wydarzenia przeczytacie tutaj) udało nam się przeprowadzić aż 248 badań z 210 użytkownikami. Dla porównania, gdybyśmy chcieli zrealizować te badania w naszym warszawskim biurze, zajęłoby to ponad dwa miesiące. W dodatku, zrobiliśmy to całkiem zwinnie.

The blind are among us. They are ordinary people like us, but they can not see all that we see. Therefore, technology should help them. In the Google Store, we can find applications for the blind. In this article, I will describe two of them and I will present their disadvantages and possible improvements. In addition, I will also show other solution proposed by scientists along with its drawbacks.

None of us is born with a built-in skill set. We are equipped with evolutionary mechanisms that help us learn. Learning, most often through practice, allows us to grow and ultimately achieve mastery in a given field. Whether it’s learning to walk, grinding social skills, or writing good code, it takes time and effort to achieve mastery. Having that in mind, let’s look at how things work.

Akka.NET is a great toolkit for building highly concurrent, distributed, and tolerant event-driven application. Hmm, I may accidentally quote their page. One can start writing fun stuff with it very quickly. But sometimes you can miss something important.

My adventure as a Scrum Master (SM) in mobile applications team started over half a year ago in company Grupa Pracuj. I already had several years of experience as a programmer and later SM in other companies, working mainly on Web applications. As it turned out, the characteristics of a mobile team are much different from what I had experienced before. But let’s start from the beginning.

My small world

Internet of Things was one of the more popular buzzwords of 2015. By now smartphones aren’t enough - people need smart clothes, smart cars and smart homes. By connecting sensors with cloud-based apps it’s possible to create whole networks of M2M (machine to machine) communication that interpret and analyze our reality. Judging only by the number of IoT kickstarter projects the trend is here to stay. But how do you join the fun?

For a long time I’ve believed that my ability to control our web application ends when the content is send from the server. We encrypt any custom content, validate tokens, authorize users, give them permissions which we validate and many, many more. But when a html is rendered and send, when all files are served to a client, then I’m not able to control what will happen on the user side.

Angular uses templates as the View part of their MVC design pattern. Templates allow to prepare the html context of where data from the controllers will be displayed.

The C# way

Visual Studio 2012 introduced a simplified approach to asynchronous programming with async and await keywords. By moving all the difficult work to the compiler your code becomes more readable and easier to maintain by resembling synchronous code flow. So loading image from assets and displaying it might look like this.

The context

Perfect Housewife will not rest after all day cleaning, even for a while. The saturday’s lazy evening is a time when she tries to lighten up home atmosphere. She used to bake some cake and serve it with coffee or tea as a good incentive to talk with members of her family. There is no better choice than warm yeast cake served with a bit of aromatic drink. There is no one in the family who would be dissapointed.

The context

JavaScript is a scripting language standardized in the ECMAScript language specification. 6th Edition ECMAScript (ES6) is a current standard which defines new language features.

Once upon a time, when HTML4 and CSS2 roamed the earth, developers became tired with the static webpages and needed an easy language to implement some basic behavior and animations to liven up the web. And lo, came JavaScript, a dynamically typed, interpreted language, where every function was an object, which was also a variable and their type could be whatever it at the moment needed to be, and it was beautiful. It had the easiest learning curve for amateurs without all the discipline of the “real” programming languages. But hey - it’s not like in 10 years people would be writing large-scale applications in it, right?

The context

In modern computer science, applications often need to withstand large amount of traffic or process a lot of data. The way to achieve required performance is distributed computing, which employs many machines to carry out tasks in parallel. Large number of nodes means that there could be problems with keeping the production environment consistent on all of them.

The context

While working on a large-scale project, as a rule, there is a work division between programmers, designers and front-end developers. Programmers often ask front-end developers which CSS class should be used, e.g. for a blue button or any other component. Twitter’s Bootstrap is a common framework for many projects, and has a great documentation. This helps both groups during the development. However, what should a front-end developer do, if he or she does not have Bootstrap, but his/her own lightweight framework tailor-made for a particular website?