Category Archives: Ranting and Reflections

IOS Dev Diary – using UIDocument

I have been working on an artist utility app, with the primary purpose to present an image and super-thin grid overlay. The inspiration came from the cropping functionality in the Photos app – but that’s very ephemeral to a the act of croping an image, and isn’t easily viewable on a continued basis (such asContinue reading “IOS Dev Diary – using UIDocument”

IOS Dev Diary – accessibility quirk with “Bold Text”

I just worked around a surprisingly tricky bug. The “Bold Text” accessibility feature in IOS has some really surprising impacts – it changes the rendering of images, specifically toolbar images. In the IOS app I’m working on, I have a toolbar icon that I made in vector format (PDF). In the back and forth ofContinue reading “IOS Dev Diary – accessibility quirk with “Bold Text””

IOS 12 DevNote: Embedded Swift Frameworks and bitcode

A side project for the barista’s at my favorite haunt has been a fun “getting back into it” programming exercise for IOS 12. It’s a silly simple app that checks the status of the network and if the local WIFI router is accessible, and provides some basic diagnostic and suggestions for the gang behind theContinue reading “IOS 12 DevNote: Embedded Swift Frameworks and bitcode”

Vapor 3 and a few random experiments

This past week I dug more deeply into server-side swift, specifically with Vapor 3. Vapor was interesting because it recently built over SwiftNIO, and initial reports of its performance were very positive. A highly performant HTTP application based framework in a memory safe language? Worth a look! I have used dynamically typed languages (NodeJS/TypeScript/Javascript andContinue reading “Vapor 3 and a few random experiments”

Adding tracing with Jaeger to an express application

I have been following distributed tracing technologies – Zipkin, OpenTracing, Jaeger, and others – for several years, without deeply trialing with any of them. Just prior to the holidays, we were having a number of those “why is this slow?” questions about an express application, written in typescript, providing an API endpoint. The API frontsContinue reading “Adding tracing with Jaeger to an express application”

Underneath your code

Underneath your code is the working title for a new writing project. I started coming up with the idea for this a couple of months ago based on what I’ve been learning and hearing. Some of this comes as a follow-up from Kubernetes for Developers, and some of this is just aiming to help newContinue reading “Underneath your code”

Review of using Helm to package and host applications

The open source project Helm represents itself as a package manager for Kubernetes. It does that pretty darn well, having been attached to the project from the earliest days of Kubernetes, and continues to evolve alongside, and now a bit more separately from, the Kubernetes project. Looking at Helm version 2, it provides three mainContinue reading “Review of using Helm to package and host applications”