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Videogame monsters: how to sow fear

Reading time4 min
Views3.3K

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?
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Understanding the POCSAG paging protocol

Reading time8 min
Views14K
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.
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Lifetime Profile Update in Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2

Reading time5 min
Views1.4K

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.



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Sixth Chromium Check, Afterword

Reading time6 min
Views2.2K
severe unicorn

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.
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Flutter app architecture 101: Vanilla, Scoped Model, BLoC

Reading time8 min
Views9.7K


(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.

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Chemistry lesson: how to expose a microchip's crystal for photography

Reading time6 min
Views2.1K

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.


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Teaching kids to program

Reading time6 min
Views2.4K

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

Vue, Storybook, TypeScript—starting a new project with the best practices in mind

Reading time12 min
Views23K


(originally published on Medium)


I like writing React code. This might be an odd introduction to a story about Vue, but you need to understand my background to understand why I’m here discussing Vue.


I like writing React code and I hate reading it. JSX is a neat idea for assembling the pieces together fast, Material-UI is amazing solution for bootstrapping your next startup’s UI, computing CSS from JS constants allows you to be very flexible. Yet reading your old JSXs feels awful – even with scrupulous code review practices you might scratch your head not once as you try to figure the intricate nesting of the components.


I’ve heard many things about Vue—the not so new kid on the block—and I finally decided to get my feet wet; bringing in all my mental luggage of React and Polymer (and Angular, but let’s not talk about that).

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Checklist: what had to be done before deploying microservices to production

Reading time9 min
Views9.7K

This article contains a brief squeeze from my own experience and that of my colleagues, with whom I had been fighting incidents day and night. And many incidents would never have occurred if all these microservices that we love so much were written at least a little more carefully.


Unfortunately, some programmers seriously believe that a Dockerfile with any team at all inside is a microservice in itself and can be deployed even now. Dockers are running — money are incoming. This approach turns into problems starting from performance degradation, inability to debug, service failures and ending in a nightmare called Data Inconsistency.


If you feel that the time has come to launch one more app in Kubernetes / ECS / whatever, then I have something to object to.

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Xcode 10.2, macOS Mojave 10.14.4, iOS 12.1 and other betas

Reading time8 min
Views6.6K


New betas are here and these are some of the most important things that I have learned about them.

Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 beta


Swift


Firstly, the latest Xcode beta is bundled with the following Swift version:

Apple Swift version 5.0 (swiftlang-1001.0.45.7 clang-1001.0.37.7)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin18.2.0
ABI version: 0.6

Let’s start with the most exciting news:
Swift apps no longer include dynamically linked libraries for the Swift standard library and Swift SDK overlays in build variants for devices running iOS 12.2, watchOS 5.2, and tvOS 12.2. As a result, Swift apps can be smaller when deployed for testing using TestFlight, or when thinning an app archive for local development distribution.
Application Binary Interface stability is coming! And this is excellent news. I think this is the one of the most significant issues at the moment with Swift. Not because of side-effects but because of Swift’s failure to deliver on previous promises. Anyway, I even know people who rewrite their Apple Watch extensions to Objective C to reduce the size of binary (something like 15MB vs ~1MB in Objective C). If you want to know more about the state of ABI, follow the links: Swift — ABI Dashboard and Swift ABI Stability Manifesto.
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Why pentesting is important to your Business?

Reading time3 min
Views1.2K
image

In today’s world, it is almost impossible to imagine a business without some type of connection to the Internet — a website, email, employee training, CRM (Customer-relationship management), CMS (Content management system), etc. It simplifies and speeds up the ordering process, search for new clients, records search and keeping, and such.
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“I can tell you about the pain every iOS developer has in the ass” — 10 questions to a developer, episode 2

Reading time7 min
Views3.6K


Seems like everyone enjoyed the pilot episode, and we’re still sure that people “behind the scenes” can be as exciting as IT celebrities we all know and love. And maybe even more, because they talk about real problems and real solutions. This week we asked 10 questions to a person behind the development of Yandex.Maps for iOS.

The authoritative guide to Blockchain Sharding

Reading time12 min
Views1.7K

Hi, I'm one of the developers of the sharded blockchain Near Protocol, and in this article want to talk about what blockchain sharding is, how it is implemented, and what problems exist in blockchain sharding designs.


It is well-known that Ethereum, the most used general purpose blockchain at the time of this writing, can only process less than 20 transactions per second on the main chain. This limitation, coupled with the popularity of the network, leads to high gas prices (the cost of executing a transaction on the network) and long confirmation times; despite the fact that at the time of this writing a new block is produced approximately every 10–20 seconds the average time it actually takes for a transaction to be added to the blockchain is 1.2 minutes, according to ETH Gas Station. Low throughput, high prices, and high latency all make Ethereum not suitable to run services that need to scale with adoption.

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Monitoring System for Windows servers on pure SQL, and how I had secretly dragged it into the Production

Reading time5 min
Views1.4K
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there was a company grown from a startup to something much bigger, but for a while the IT department was still compact and very efficient. That company hosted on prem hundreds of virtual Windows servers, and of course these servers were monitored. Even before I joined the company, NetIQ had been chosen as a monitoring solution.

One of my new tasks was to support NetIQ. The person, who worked with NetIQ before, said a lot about his experience with NetIQ, unfortunately, if I try to put it here it would be just a long line of ‘****’ characters. Soon I realized why. Steve Jobs is probably spinning in his grave looking at the interface like this:

image
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