Categories
Managing

Engineering Management 101

There are as many approaches to engineering management as there are managers. Unlike for technical disciplines, there is rarely a formally-trained manager. Each manager, after a few years as an engineer, has to come up with their own approach to the job and learn from books, articles, and personal experience. In my years of engineering […]

Categories
Programming Swift

map() versus flatMapThrowing()

This threw me off for a little and I’d like to share my findings. I’m using Vapor on a little side-project and part of the beauty of that backend framework is that everything is a stream, backed by SwiftNIO. Now I haven’t done any benchmarks, performance-wise, but it’s nice to have a backend that uses streams, and a […]

Categories
Programming Swift

Deploying Swift to Ubuntu

In this article, I’m going describe how to create a Linux environment where we can deploy a Swift-backed server-side app. In a past article, I created a Notes app with both a client and server component and shared business logic, all written in Swift. Now, we need to create a remote (or virtual) environment where we […]

Categories
Programming Swift

Sharing Swift code between server and iPhone app

In this short exercise, I create an app that shares code with a server component using Swift, Xcode and Kitura. The goals of this exercise are as follow: Create an environment where Xcode is the sole IDE Create three Xcode projects: the mobile app, the server-side app, and the shared business logic The mobile app […]

Categories
Readings

Excerpts from Steve Jobs

I started reading biographies a few years ago with Peter the Great: A Biography. My motivation to plow through 700+ page tomes was primairly fuelled by a love for history. When I finished that book it occurred to me that the Tsar’s life was more than a history lesson, it was a lesson on living as […]

Categories
Managing

How to Motivate and Retain Programmers

In the tech industry, high turnover rates for programmers are all too common, and wildly detrimental to a company’s profitability. This phenomenon is especially problematic for companies in less subjectively interesting domains such as B2B software development. As people come and go, mounting technical debt and recruiting costs cripple the bottom line. How can a company […]

Categories
General Tech

Friday’s internet outage

Friday’s internet outage was caused by multiple sustained attacks against one of the internet biggest service providers, Dyn DNS. The attack blocked access to services like Twitter.com for millions of users in the east coast of North America. The FBI is investigating the outage as a possible criminal activity and some have gone so far as to suggest […]