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This post explores some of the more common types of GPS tracking errors to expect with low-end GPS devices, providing an understanding of what causes them as well as some approaches for correcting them. The techniques outlined can provide users of low-end GPS devices with a reasonable level of automated improvement of the accuracy of their GPS tracks.

I often hear iOS developers ask some variant of the same key question: “What’s the best way to develop a UI in iOS: through Storyboards, NIBs, or code?”

Answers to this question, explicitly or implicitly, tend to assume that there’s a mutually exclusive choice to be made, one that is often addressed upfront, before development.

I’m of the opinion that there’s no single choice to be made. Rather, each option has its strengths and weaknesses—and there’s no need to use any one of them in isolation.

Go is a relatively new language with a number of attractive features. It’s great for writing concurrent programs, thanks to an excellent set of low-level features for handling concurrency. In many cases, though, a handful of reusable abstractions over those low-level mechanisms makes life much easier. This introductory tutorial walks you through building one such abstraction: a wrapper that can turn any data structure into a transactional service in Go.

The recent resurgence in Artificial Intelligence has been powered in no small part by a new trend in machine learning, known as “Deep Learning”. In this article, I’ll introduce you to the key concepts and algorithms behind Deep Learning, beginning with the simplest building block.

I love and use Django in lots of my personal and client projects, mostly for those involving relational databases and more classical web applications. However, by design, Django is very tightly coupled with its ORM, Template Engine System, and Settings object. Plus, it’s not a new project: it carries a lot of baggage from the past to remain backwards compatible.

In a few of my client projects, we’ve chosen to give up on Django and use a micro framework like Flask, typically when the client wants to do some interesting stuff with the framework. At the same time, we often need user registration, login, and more, all of which is easily handled with Django.

The question emerged: is Django an all-or-nothing deal? Should we drop it completely from the project, or is there a way to combine some it with the flexibility of other frameworks?

Writing concurrent programs is hard. Having to deal with threads, locks, race conditions, and so on is highly error-prone and can lead to code that is difficult to read, test, and maintain. This post provides an introductory guide to the Scala-based Akka framework, showing (with code samples) how Akka facilitates and simplifies the implementation of robust, concurrent, fault-tolerant applications.

Mobile web development—optimizing web apps for mobile devices—is necessary for modern apps. Discover the best methods and tools for the development of highly functional, intuitive, and easy-to-use mobile web apps.

In a recent phone screen, I decided to use a class attribute in my implementation of a certain Python API. My interviewer challenged me, questioning whether my code was syntactically valid, when it was executed, etc. In fact, I wasn’t sure of the answers myself. So I did some digging.

Python class attributes: when (or how) to use them. In this guide, I walk you through common pitfalls and conclude with a list of valid use cases that could save you time, energy, and lines of code.

Elasticsearch provides a powerful, scalable tool for indexing and querying massive amounts of structured data, built on top of the Apache Lucene library.

Building on the foundation of Elasticsearch and the Elasticsearch-Ruby client, we’ve developed and released our own improvement (and simplification) of the Elasticsearch application search architecture that also provides tighter integration with Rails. We’ve packaged it as a Ruby gem named Chewy.

This post discusses how we accomplished this, including the technical obstacles that emerged during implementation.

The need to adapt legacy code and systems to meet modern day performance and processing demands is widespread. This post provides a case study of the use of Erlang and CloudI to adapt legacy code, consisting of a decades-old collection of multi-user game software written in C, to the 21st century.

Making a basic Android app is easy. But making it reliable, scalable, and robust, on the other hand, can be quite challenging. With thousands of available devices pumped out from tons of different manufacturers, assuming that a single piece of code will work reliably across phones is naive at best. Segmentation is the greatest tradeoff for having an open platform, and we pay the price in the currency of code maintenance, which continues long after the app passes the production stage.

In this post, we’ll walk through a solution: automated crash reporting with ACRA and a Cloudant back-end, all visualizable with acralyzer.