I’ve occasionally been working at The Frontier in RTP during the week. We have a small office there and I’ve noticed I don’t like using my headphones when in there. So I picked up a UE Roll Bluetooth Speaker based on a Wirecutter recommendation. I’m really happy with it. It is small but heavy, feels durable, and sounds great.
Apparently I’m not the only one named “Josh Johnson” that has a problem with German numbers. Here is a web-based game by another Josh Johnson to help with your German number learning. It also uses React.js which is something I’ve been wanting to play with. You can see the code on Github.
I just finished a marathon of the 4th season of “House of Cards” on Netflix. I think the season was good but real life presidential elections seem so much more crazy.
Last night at NSCoder Night we were playing around with Dan Leehr’s new app Clone. It’s really a great 1.0. With this and Travis CI, I can now publish to this blog from my iPhone or iPad Pro by just committing to Github.
Realm, which posts amazing videos regularly, has just posted a Guide to Functional Reactive Programming. They discuss the why, the what, the how, and the who all while linking to some great videos. Definitely a nice resource if you haven’t looked into this. I’ve read a lot about it but I don’t think I’ve fully internalized this yet. This will definitely help.
This weekend I spent some time at the Ticketmaster DevJam in Durham. They are working on a public API with events, venues, and more that they’d like to get developers using. For me, it was a day long event with food and building a weird app with some friends.
Continue Reading »At tonight’s CocoaHeads, I did a small talk on using Server Side Swift and deploying it with Docker and Ansible. Everything was going fine until the Swift Web Framework I was using crashed. Turns out someone pushed a breaking change in the 30 minutes between my test run and my live demo. This is why you don’t do live demos and don’t rely on latest from a remote repository.
Apple posted videos from their Apple TV Tech Talks. I wanted this API so badly for a long time and have still done nothing with it. Maybe these videos will inspire me.
Interesting, and unsurprising, news today that Xamarin has been acquired by Microsoft. I’ve never used it directly to build apps but I did to some research into using their test cloud system (which is actually calabash-based, something I’ve worked a lot with and have written about before). I hear of a lot of people loving to be able to build iOS apps without learning Objective-C or Swift.
This gives Microsoft an interesting position as a vendor of an iOS SDK. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.
So I bought one of those “mattress in a box” mattresses. It arrives today and I’m super excited. I’ve been getting horrible sleep lately and I think our 15 year old spring mattress gets some of the blame. We reviewed a lot of different ones and ended up picking the Purple mattress. It had some great reviews and probably one of the funniest videos on YouTube.