Hi everyone! About six months ago we launched one of Badoo’s most exciting features: Live Streaming. One of its main functionalities is that viewers can send gifts to their favourite streamers to express their appreciation. We wanted to make the gifts as fancy and as engaging as possible, so it was decided to make some of them really lively, and by this I mean animated. And to engage people even more, we, the Badoo team, planned to update those gifts and animations every few weeks.

As an iOS engineer, you might have already guessed the challenge we faced here: the need to add new animations and remove the old ones was going to require a fair amount of work from the client side. We’d need both the Android and the iOS development teams for every release — which, when combined with the amount of time App Store reviews and approval often take, would mean it might be days before each update could go live. But we solved the problem, and I’m going to explain to you how.

Solution overview

By this stage, we already knew how to export Adobe After Effects (AAE) animations into the format readable by our iOS app using the Lottie library. This time though, we went a bit further: we decided to create a kind of animation storage service, available via the internet. In other words, we would store all the actual animations on the server and deliver them to the client apps on demand:

In this article, we invite you to try to find a bug in a very simple function from the GNU Midnight Commander project. Why? For no particular reason. Just for fun. Well, okay, it's a lie. We actually wanted to show you yet another bug that a human reviewer has a hard time finding and the static code analyzer PVS-Studio can catch without effort.

Known now as a «motherboard speaker», or just «beeper», PC Speaker has been introduced in 1981 along with the first personal IBM computer. Being a successor of the big serious computers for serious business, it has been designed to produce very basic system beeps, so it never really had a chance to shine bright as a music device in numerous entertainment programs of the emerging home market. Overshadowed by much more advanced sound chips of popular home game systems, quickly replaced with powerful sound cards, it mostly served as a fallback option, playing severely downgraded content of better sound hardware.

«System Beeps» is a music album in shape of an MS-DOS program that features original music composed for PC Speaker using the same basic old techniques like ones found in classic PC games. It follows the usual retro computing demoscene formula — take something rusty and obsolete, and push it to eleven — and attempts to reveal the long hidden potential of this humble little sound device. You can hear it in action and form an opinion on how successful this attempt was at Bandcamp, or in the video below. The following article is an in-depth overview of the original PC Speaker capabilities and making of the project, for those who would like to know more.

In Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 we have continued to improve the C++ backend with new features, new and improved optimizations, build throughput improvements, and quality of life changes.

Sberbank is the largest bank in Russia and Eastern Europe. Our team in Sbertech teaches Sberbank efficient work with Free & Open Source Software. You can read more about this on Habr (what we exactly do, yet in Russian).

One of the main challenges is to open the mind of managers and engineers for using FOSS (Free & Open Source Software) properly. Because we have a lot of them, we have tried to use GIFs for answer the most common questions.

The Rust ecosystem is still growing. As a result, new libraries with improved functionality are frequently released into the developer community, while older libraries become obsolete. When we initially designed Exonum, we used the Iron web-framework. In this article, we describe how we ported the Exonum framework to actix-web using generic programming.

This is a short “how to” article about sending emails with SpringFramework. I will provide couple examples and I will show a popular problem.

Just about the fastest portable 64-bit hash function with decent quality.

This is a translation of the original article by Leonid Yuriev.

We’re excited to announce that Visual Studio 2019 will ship a new version of F# when it releases: F# 4.6!

F# 4.6 is a smaller update to the F# language, making it a “true” point-release. As with previous versions of F#, F# 4.6 was developed entirely via an open RFC (requests for comments) process. The F# community has offered very detailed feedback in discussions for this version of the language. You can view all RFCs that correspond with this release here:

• F# 4.6 RFCs
• FSharp.Core 4.6.0 RFCs

This post will detail the feature set and how to get started.

In video games, enemies are one of the key figures, without which a game might lose its meaning, and when it’s not only enemies, but terrifying monsters, they often create the chilling atmosphere intended by the developers. It’s impossible to imagine Silent Hill without the Pyramid Head, or Outlast without Chris Walker, and so on, you get the idea. Monsters are a cumulative image of a video game enemy, and it’s not necessarily an ugly demon or a giant spider: even an angry neighbor, like in Hello Neighbor, is a monster despite his human appearance.

This is where the reader probably asks:

what’s the point of this article?

Long time ago, when a mobile phone costed about 2000$ and one minute of voice call was 50 cents, pagers were really popular. Later cellular phones became cheaper, calls and SMS prices became lower, and finally pagers mostly disappeared.


For people, who owned a pager before, and want to know how it works, this article will be useful.

The C++ Core Guidelines’ Lifetime Profile, which is part of the C++ Core Guidelines, aims to detect lifetime problems, like dangling pointers and references, in C++ code. It uses the type information already present in the source along with some simple contracts between functions to detect defects at compile time with minimal annotation.

Let’s find out how to make a simple enough laser projector out of electronics you can find at home.

It is new selection of tips and tricks about Python and programming from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc.

Previous publications:

• December 2018

At the beginning of 2018 our blog was complemented with a series of articles on the sixth check of the source code of the Chromium project. The series includes 8 articles on errors and recommendations for their prevention. Two articles sparked heated discussion, and l still occasionally get comments by mail about topics covered in them. Perhaps, I should give additional explanations and as they say, set the record straight.

Today we’re happy to announce the availability of our release candidate (RC) of TypeScript 3.3. Our hope is to collect feedback and early issues to ensure our final release is simple to pick up and use right away.

This week we issue a really huge selection of all the essential news you might have missed on Front-end development. Make sure to check the latest updates on CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

(originally published on Medium)

Flutter provides a modern react-style framework, rich widget collection and tooling, but there’s nothing similar to Android’s guide to app architecture.

Indeed, there’s no ultimate architecture that would meet all the possible requirements, yet let’s face the fact that most of the mobile apps we are working on have at least some of the following functionality:

1. Request/upload data from/to the network.
2. Map, transform, prepare data and present it to the user.
3. Put/get data to/from the database.

Taking this into account I have created a sample app that is solving exactly the same problem using three different approaches to the architecture.

Introduction

If you have dabbled into microchip photographing before, then this article will probably not offer much to you. But if you want to get into it, but don’t know where to start, then it’s exactly for you.

Before we start, a fair warning: while the procedure is quite entertaining, at first it’ll probably be physically painful. The chemicals used during the process are toxic, so please handle them carefully – that way it’ll still hurt, but less so. Also, if you have even a slight amount of common sense, conduct the procedure in a fully-equipped chemical laboratory under supervision of trained professionals: we’ve had to deal with people who tried to do it at home immediately after reading the guide. And finally: if you don’t know whether you need to pour acid into water or water into acid without a Google search and don’t realize what this lack of knowledge will entail – stop reading this immediately and go to a chemistry 101 course in a local college or something.

Hi. My name is Michael Kapelko. I've been developing software professionally for more than 10 years. Recent years were dedicated to iOS. I develop games and game development tools in my spare time.

Overview

Today I want to share my experience of teaching kids to program. I'm going to discuss the following topics:

• organization of the learning process
• learning plan
• memory game
• development tools
• lessons
• results and plans