I wish that Google provided an offline/dev version of Firebase so that I could work on my mobile app when I’m not actually online. Sort of like they offer a dev version of Datastore for App Engine development. I wish that Google made their Flutter documentation available as a downloadable package so that I couldContinue reading “Things I Wish”
Category Archives: programming
Mobile Enterprise
So, I’m writing another mobile app. This one is a chore list for our household. And, since our household is not technologically homogenous, I’m writing it in Flutter so I can deploy it to All The Devices. Flutter’s idiom is lambda-heavy, and most of the tutorials and examples wind up embedding application logic in theContinue reading “Mobile Enterprise”
Nonrandom Thoughts on a Holiday Afternoon
Oh, lots of things going through my head. No real coherence to speak of, though. Let’s see, a useful life lesson from Victor / Victoria happy outcome from reading the release notes not everything in the 80s sucked (X still makes me happy) (but most of the 80s sucked) Victor / Victoria Before I everContinue reading “Nonrandom Thoughts on a Holiday Afternoon”
Something They Leave Out
Here’s something the tutorials don’t tell you, but that is kind of important: Flutter plugins add their own CocoaPod dependencies to the iOS project. This is why the installation instructions for Firebase tell you to skip through everything in the iOS installation after you install the GoogleService-Info.plist file. The rest of the installation gets handledContinue reading “Something They Leave Out”
Team of One
I have been writing programs of varying complexity since I was in the 6th grade, so, call it 39 years. For a portion of that time, call it 14 years, I worked on code that had other people contributing to it. During that, what, 36% percent of my programming life, I learned many lessons thatContinue reading “Team of One”
I Hate Your Bot
I dunno, something like a year ago, a guy I know started retweeting a client of his who was working on building a chatbot platform. Now, let’s be honest: in customer facing positions, a lot of interactions are going to be the same. People are way more similar than they are different, and so if oneContinue reading “I Hate Your Bot”
It’s Never Easy
So, the Internet of Things is a thing that’s mostly just a security nightmare, but there do exist some services that I find actually helpful. For instance, I put an Ambient Weather station on our roof and hooked it up to Weather Underground and that lets me get ad-free weather forecasts. Lots of people haveContinue reading “It’s Never Easy”
Here’s A Useful Testing Application
So, a few years back, I consulted at NASA doing some work on a really cool system for storing and retrieving documentation on systems in flight. Basically, it was a very customized Bugzilla that winds up saving the American taxpayer millions of dollars every year. There’s a post I wrote at the time about how toContinue reading “Here’s A Useful Testing Application”
Because of Course
Today I received the April newsletter from JetBrains, wherein they provide links to a bunch of Java news. Most of it is stuff that isn’t immediately interesting to me, but this time there was a swell one-two punch. One, Java 10 is out and Java 11 has been announced (what? 9 just came out, like,Continue reading “Because of Course”
TableColumn and ObservableValue
Today I learned a couple of things that they don’t tell you in the official documentation or on Stack Overflow. If you want to display some information in a table and that information updates and you want to display those updates, then you have to hook things up the hard way, and not the wayContinue reading “TableColumn and ObservableValue”