Fastlane is a suite of simple yet powerful tools to automate building and releasing iOS and Android apps. It takes care of the mundane tasks of mobile application development like generating screenshots, managing provisioning profiles, code signing, beta deployments and releasing the application. It is very popular in the mobile developer community and the best part - it is completely open source.
The Toolchain fastlane comes out-of-the-box with a set of very good tools (better known as actions) such as:
I had the wonderful opportunity to attend Google I/O last week and absolutely loved it. I learned a lot of things during the three days. Btw, it was tiring too with the continuous sessions and the sunny Sun.
This post is an attempt to share the main highlights and the announcements that I found interesting. If you attended the event or watched the sessions online, let me know if there were more things that you found interesting.
I use Xcode playground a lot in order to write code snippets - either to try out something that I read in a blog, or to demonstrate a code improvement that I want to suggest in a code review, or sometimes even to prototype a design before doing the full-blown implementation in Xcode project. During this experimentation phase, the correctness of the code was verified by analyzing the ouput displayed on the right-hand side column of the playground.
Realm is a company that I respect a lot because of their support for mobile developers and the open nature nature of their offerings. Their easy-to-use, blazingly fast Mobile database software supports all mobile platforms - iOS, Android, React Native and Xamarin, in Java, ObjC, Swift and C#. That is why I am happy to see that today they announced Realm Mobile Platform that combines Realm client side database with server-side technology (Object Server as they call it).
As part of my Machine Learning course, I learned a useful trick which I will share hoping that it may help someone or I myself can refer to it later. The problem at hand was how to display the mathematical expressions that calculate cost function, gradient descent etc. in a blog or web page. In OneNote, you can do it using OneNote Equation tool earlier, but I wanted to do the same in my blog posts.
Few weeks ago, I started the Machine Learning course on Coursera by Andrew Ng of Stanford University. The course is great, learning a lot of new concepts. Sometimes it is hard, but it is really fun learning this new topic and brushing up the old Math lessons of Linear Algebra, matrix manipulation and derivatives.
The course starts with the basics, including a primer on Linear Algebra (it is optional, but I took it anyway since it has been more than a decade when I learned it in college).
I have been thoroughly enjoying working on ReactNative projects, but was disappointed by the lack of a good debugging environment. I had tried multiple solutions like Nuclide (which I found it to be very slow), WebStorm with JSX plugins (which is mainly syntax recognition). So I had to always launch the app from Xcode/Android Studio, then attach Chrome Dev tools and keep switching between all three for debugging. This was frustrating, but there is hope…
The User Interface is going beyond UI and voice recognition to the new trend of using conversation as a new way to engage with customers, i.e. Conversation As Interface. It is a more natural form of communication, especially for question-answer / interview experiences.
Now there is an emerging trend of companies opening their chat bot API to third party developers. Facebook has been running many experiments in their Messenger app allowing a few developers like Uber, Assist etc.
This is my first blog post created by Hugo, a simple, fast and powerful blogging engine written in Go. Setting up my blog on Hugo was quick and easy; it took less than 4 hours.
I have set this up such that I publish the content to GitHub pages, so the publish workflow is as simple as writing some Markdown and a git push. This is a good tutorial on how to do this.