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Demystifying iOS 9 Spotlight Search for Developers
Spotlight search in Apple iOS 9, compared to earlier versions, has been made much more prominent and personal. With suggestions from Siri and integration opportunities for third-party apps, iPhone’s search functionality is no longer limited to the scope of Apple’s own apps. In this article, Toptal engineer Richard Forsythe explores some iOS SDK functionalities that allow apps to make content available to the user via Spotlight search.
Richard Forsythe
Richard’s posseses in-depth experience in a multitude of roles covering development, product ownership, and QA engineering.
Single Responsibility Principle: A Recipe for Great Code
Maintainable code is something we all desire and there are no shortage of coding principles that promise it. It is not always apparent how tremendously useful these principles are during the early stages of development. Nonetheless, the effort put in to ensure these qualities certainly pay off as the project grows and development continues. In this article, Toptal engineer Adel Fayzrakhmanov discusses how the Single Responsibility Principle is one of the most important aspect in writing good maintainable code.
Adel Fayzrakhmanov
Adel (MCE) has 15+ years in software development, focused on web technology and quality architecture. PHP and .NET are his forté.
Hosting for Freelance Developers: PaaS, VPS, Cloud, and More
Whether you’re creating a virtual storefront, deploying an app, or simply doing some third-party testing and development, chances are you need some server muscle. The good news is that there is a lot to choose from. The hosting industry may not be loud or exciting, but it never sleeps; it’s a dog eat dog world, with cutthroat pricing, a lot of innovation behind the scenes, and cyclical hardware updates.
In this article, we take a look at hosting options for freelance software engineers: PaaS, Cloud, VPS, dedicated, and more.
Nermin Hajdarbegovic
As a veteran tech writer, Nermin helped create online publications covering everything from the semiconductor industry to cryptocurrency.
Building a Color-based Image Search Engine in Ruby
With modern image editing tools, we often take for granted the ability to extract or identify color on some part of any image. However, doing it programmatically is not exactly so straightforward. Camalian, a Ruby gem, changes that, making extracting and manipulating colors in an image as easy as possible. In this article, Toptal engineer Nazar Hussain provides some insight into how various color spaces work, introduces Camalian, and gives an overview of how to use it to build a color-based image search engine in Ruby.
Nazar Hussain
Nazar has a background in all aspects of development, including initial design, programming, implementation, and user support.
What the Hell Is DevOps?
Using modern DevOps Tools like Chef, Docker, Ansible, Packer, Troposphere, Consul, Jenkins, SonarQube, AWS, etc., does not mean that you are applying DevOps principles. DevOps is a way of thinking.
Demir Selmanovic
Demir is a developer and project manager with over 15 years of professional experience in a wide range of software development roles.
Ultimate Guide to the Processing Language Part I: The Fundamentals
Rapid prototyping and the ability to produce quick visual results are features of many programming languages and frameworks. However, some take it even further by making these their primary goals. Processing, a programming language based on Java, allows its users to code within the context of visual arts and has been designed from the ground up to provide instant visual feedback. In this article, Toptal engineer Oguz Gelal provides a gentle introduction to Processing and some insights into its inner mechanics.
Oguz Gelal
Oguz is a software engineer and full-stack web developer. He has worked with a number of frameworks and tools, fron- and back-end.
iOS 9 Betas And WatchOS 2 For Developers
Apple’s iOS 9 and WatchOS 2 updates brings a number of novel features, including improved multitasking for iPads and a host of aesthetic tweaks. However, while iOS 9 is just an incremental update with a focus on the new iPad Pro, WatchOS 2 is not a skin-deep update. Apple has changed the WatchOS architecture and opened up a range of new possibilities for developers.
Nermin Hajdarbegovic
As a veteran tech writer, Nermin helped create online publications covering everything from the semiconductor industry to cryptocurrency.
Going Real-Time with Redis Pub/Sub
Real-time applications have already started to dominate the landscape of the Internet. With modern frameworks and standardization of the necessary client-side features, building a real-time web application has become a breeze. However, such web applications still pose unique scalability challenges.
In this article, Toptal engineer Mahmud Ridwan explores the architecture of a simple real-time web application that works using Redis Pub/Sub and doesn’t compromise its horizontal scalability.
Mahmud Ridwan
Mahmud is a software developer with many years of experience and a knack for efficiency, scalability, and stable solutions.
Impostor Syndrome: How I Fool My Bosses, and You Too
By and large, I haven’t run into any major disadvantages or advantages to being a woman in the software field. I feel like that’s a story not told enough in the debate, where the experience is just like anything else in life: some good, some bad, overall average.
Kate Scheer
A true multipotentialite, Kate has worked as a video game artist, full-stack developer, movie script author, tech editor, and animal vet.
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