Technology

How do we understand and interpret the huge amounts of data coming out of simulations? How do we visualize potential gigabytes of datapoints in a large dataset? In this article I will give a quick introduction to VTK and its pipeline architecture, and go on to discuss a real-life visualization example.

It’s been over 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau specified HTML, which became the standard markup language used to build the Internet.

HTML5 was supposed to finally solve our problems and become “one standard to rule them all (browsers)”. This was probably one of the most anticipated technologies since creation of the World Wide Web.

React.js is a fantastic library. It is only one part of a front-end application stack, however. It doesn’t have much to offer when it comes to managing data and state. Facebook, the makers of React, have offered some guidance there in the form of Flux. I’ll introduce basic Flux control flow, discuss what’s missing for Stores, and how to use Backbone Models and Collections to fill the gap in a “Flux-compliant” way.

Today we have thousands of digital and printed resources that provide step-by-step instructions about developing all kinds of different web applications. Development environments are “smart” enough to catch and fix many mistakes that early developers battled with regularly. There are even many different development platforms that easily turn simple static HTML pages into highly interactive applications.

All of these development patterns, practices, and platforms share common ground, and they are all prone to similar mistakes caused by the very nature of web applications.

Hoodie is a progressive new library for front-end developers that adopts some remarkable new philosophies. Hoodie puts the control over app design completely in the hands of the front-end developers and user-experience experts, and frees users from the bonds of un-interruptible connectivity.

Data conversion, translation, and mapping is by no means rocket science, but it is by all means tedious. This article introduces MetaDapper, a .NET library that strives to simplify, streamline, and automate the data conversion process to the greatest extent possible.

Google Glass promises to revolutionize how we use our devices to interact with the world. But from a developer’s standpoint, what is so special about developing for the Glass? You’ll be glad to know that the answer is “Nothing!” Here’s a step-by-step tutorial that walks you through developing your first Google Glass app.

The popularity and usage of Scala is rapidly on the rise, as evidenced by the ever-increasing number of open positions for Scala developers.

In this article, Toptal engineer Matt Hicks introduces you to the power and capabilities of the Scala language.

Scientific computing is hard. But thanks to an ever-growing landscape of open source tools, really tough problems are becoming easier to solve. Toptal engineer Charles Cook provides an in-depth example, leveraging open source tools to solve a problem in computational fluid dynamics.

This Machine Learning tutorial introduces the basics of ML theory, laying down the common themes and concepts, making it easy to follow the logic and get comfortable with the topic.

The Cake development team considers CakePHP 3 to be a game changer. With the alpha version of CakePHP 3 now hot out of the oven, this article takes a fresh look at CakePHP as an effective modern framework for PHP development.

PHP makes it relatively easy to build a web-based system, which is much of the reason for its popularity. But its ease of use notwithstanding, PHP has evolved into quite a sophisticated language, with many nuances and subtleties that can bite developers, leading to hours of hair-pulling debugging. This article highlights ten of the more common mistakes that PHP developers need to beware of.

Ember Data is a library for robustly managing model data in Ember.js applications. Ember Data offers a more flexible and streamlined development workflow, minimizing code churn in response to high-impact changes that would otherwise be disruptive. This comprehensive guide introduces the key constructs and paradigms of Ember Data, demonstrating the value it can bring to you as a developer.

Which Ruby implementation is right for your project? While the reference implementation (Ruby MRI) remains the interpreter of choice, an alternate Ruby implementation may be right for your project, depending on your operational goals and constraints.

This article showcases the Ruby interpreter implementations and runtimes available today, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Web services and their APIs abound. Unfortunately, the vast majority are difficult to use. Reasons range from poor design, to lack of documentation, to volatility, to unresolved bugs, or in some cases, all of the above.

Follow the guidance in this post to help ensure that your web API is clean, well-documented, and easy-to-use. Such APIs are truly rare and are therefore much more likely to be widely adopted and used.

Rails is both easy to use—and also to misuse. Let’s look at 10 common Rails programming mistakes, explore their consequences, and discover ways to steer clear, as we write clean Ruby on Rails code.