About the game Streets of Rogue

In 2017 tinyBuild released Streets of Rogue, a unique visual successor to the hit game Punch Club. Streets of Rogue is remarkable for the variety of its game features and genre elements. The developers combined an intense top-down roguelike, a retro pixel art style, an atmosphere of irrepressible excitement, classic character levelling, and questing. The game revolves around playing through a series of randomly generated cities. This can be accomplished via brute force, stealth, or hacking — it’s up to you!

How and why the game needed to be localized

Streets of Rogue quickly garnered a warm reception from gamers and the press alike, so tinyBuild naturally decided to bring the game to a wider international audience.

When talking about "bad code" people almost certainly mean "complex code" among other popular problems. The thing about complexity is that it comes out of nowhere. One day you start your fairly simple project, the other day you find it in ruins. And no one knows how and when did it happen.

But, this ultimately happens for a reason! Code complexity enters your codebase in two possible ways: with big chunks and incremental additions. And people are bad at reviewing and finding both of them.

App localization statistics, case studies and analytics

IaC (Infrastructure as Code) is a modern approach and I believe that infrastructure is code. It means that we should use the same philosophy for infrastructure as for software development. If we are talking that infrastructure is code, then we should reuse practices from development for infrastructure, i.e. unit testing, pair programming, code review. Please, keep in mind this idea while reading the article.

Russian Version

If you have no idea about the development architecture and mechanical/electrical design behind IoT solutions, they could seem like "having seemingly supernatural qualities or powers". For example, if you show a working IoT system to 18th century people, they'd think it's magic.This article is sort of busting such myth. Or, to put it more technically, about hints for fine-tuning the IoT development for an awesome project in solar energy management area.

This article aims to show how to use Kotlin Coroutines and remove Reaxtive eXtensions (Rx).

Benefits

To start let's consider four benefits of Coroutines over Rx:

Suspending over Blocking

To run non-blocking code using Rx you'd write something like this:

Observable.interval(1, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
    .subscribe {
        textView.text = "$it seconds have passed"
    }

Which is effectively creating a new thread. Threads are heavy objects in terms of memory and performance.

Both are critical in the mobile development world.

You can achieve the same behavior using the following snippet:

launch {
    var i = 0
    while (true){
        textView.text = "${it++} seconds have passed"
        delay(1000)
    }
}

Essentially, Coroutines are light-weight threads but we don't create any real thread.
Here we are using non-blocking delay() function, which is a special suspending function that does not block a thread but suspends the Coroutine.

Human pose estimation

A few months ago I came across one interesting open source project on the Internet — Openpose the aim of which is to estimate a human pose in real-time on a video stream. Due to my professional activities, I was interested to run it on the latest iOS device from Apple to check the performance and figure out if it is possible at all. It was also interesting to see how the performance of the neural network framework for iOS has been changed in the last years.

Contents

• Concerning shared resources
• Possible issues in multi-threaded environments
  • Deadlock
  • Race-Condition
  • Busy-Wait
  • Thread Starvation
• Synchronization methods
  • Interlocked
  • Monitor.Enter, Monitor.Exit, lock
  • SpinLock, SpinWait
  • Monitor.Wait, Monitor.Pulse[All]
  • ReaderWriterLockSlim
  • The ResetEvent family
• Conclusions