August 21, 2017. The day the sun went dark. Starting in Oregon and ending in South Carolina, the eclipse was a sight to see. A partial eclipse could be seen from most of the United States, but that wasn’t good enough for several E-gineers. Troy, Don, Tim, and I traveled down to Scottsville, KY to witness totality. Totality happens when the sun is completely covered by the moon, and it could only be seen within a 70-mile band across the… [continue]
Approximately Pi-Approximation Day
There’s Pi Day (3.14 or March 14th) and then there’s Pi Approximation Day (22/7 or 22 July), which is technically tomorrow. So, within a little over 4 months there are (at least) two wonderful occasions for baking, and eating, pie. We take these opportunities very seriously around here. The math behind date-based compulsory pie eating may be a little complicated, but we find that eating the pies themselves comes very easily. Besides the straightforward connection we make from computing and… [continue]
Exploring Progressive Web Applications
Over the past few years, the web applications I’ve worked on have increasingly taken a mobile-first design approach. This is great from a presentation standpoint, providing the users with a practical interface for their device, but does not really help deal with flaky mobile networks. Progressive Web Applications provide a way to optimize for connectivity issues. What is a Progressive Web Application? At their core, Progressive Web Applications are simply web applications. They’re a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They… [continue]
Swift Essentials: Optionals
Swift is designed to be safer than C-based programming languages. For example, Swift is a type safe language, that uses compile-time type checking to help catch errors early in the development process. And Swift uses type inference to enable the compiler to deduce types, requiring far fewer explicit type declarations. Another language feature that enhances safety is the optional. When you declare an instance in Swift, that instance must have a valid value for its type. If that instance can potentially be nil, then… [continue]
Swimming in the deep end with RxJava and Android
At E-gineering, we’ve been using RxJava to help us handle networking (with Retrofit) and threading in Android apps due to the ease with which it handles these tasks. As a learning exercise, Nate Ridderman and I wanted to challenge ourselves to dig deeper with RxJava and get to know some additional operators. Knowing that one of the primary raison d’être and abilities of RxJava is to handle streams of events, we decided to try using it to handle touch inputs…. [continue]
Bringing new life to a Sales application suite. And DevOps!
A little over a year ago, one of our clients came to us and asked if we would take over a project that had fallen into disrepair. Much effort had been expended to get the project off the ground several years ago but time and other priorities had taken their toll. Users were growing increasingly frustrated with bugs, performance problems, data issues and the lack of any forward movement in terms of new features. Several attempts were made to breathe life… [continue]
Android Data Binding Subtleties
One of the things I love about being an Android developer is the amount of resources available at my fingertips on the Internet. There’s a strong community of developers sharing open source libraries, promoting design patterns, and just helping out their peers. For the last several years I’ve primarily been a consumer of these resources, but it’s time to change that! My first blog post describes the process of fixing a relatively obscure bug. I’m following the advice of @chiuki:… [continue]
Backpacking Deam
The Deam Team ~ I’m sure that’s the first time that joke has ever been made. Or perhaps not… A few, proud group of E-gineers (and a stalwart friend of E-g) recently made our way out to the Charles C. Deam Wilderness, within the Hoosier National Forest for a backpacking adventure. We had been talking about putting a trip like that together for awhile. With a little persistence and planning, what started out as “talk” became a “walk!” … [continue]
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