I love StackOverflow and it has significantly contributed to my journey as a developer over the years. As the years have gone by, StackOverflow has experienced tremendous growth. More often than not, when you Google a development-related problem, a StackOverflow question (or two) will appear on the first page. However, the quality of the site has slipped a little.
Legendary programmer John Carmack said it best in 2013 about StackOverflow
Recently while browsing Tomsguide, I came across an article claiming that using a VPN provider on Android phones, you can spoof your GPS location in Pokemon Go. Considering Pokemon Go is tightly controlled and most known techniques have not worked in years, I thought I would investigate.
I still play Pokemon Go, but the thought of being able to use a VPN to spoof my location and potentially catch some location-specific Pokemon, it was too tempting to not try.
The Hello Games team who develop the game No Man’s Sky just continue to impress me. Not only did they rescue a highly hyped game that launched to a tonne of negativity for the content it was lacking, to the point where it was nicknamed Refund Simulator, but they have continued to work on it over the years and bring it back from the brink.
Since launch, we’ve reviewed three major updates, each of which brings significant new changes to the game in the form of content, mechanic improvements, as well as fixes. Update 3.0 titled Origins is perhaps the biggest and best update so far that the team have released.
If you work in tech as a designer or developer, there is a high chance the company you work for uses Slack as its internal communication tool of choice. In March 2020, Slack released an update it dubbed “significant” which cleaned up the interface and introduced a few new shortcuts.
When Slack landed on the scene, it was hot (about as hot as Zoom is now during the pandemic). Workplaces adopted it en masse, but pretty quickly Slack went from hot new thing to just another enterprise chore application that ends up overwhelming us.
It has been years since CSS Houdini was revealed in 2016 and admittedly, it has been very slow going. Although, since the W3C task force was announced there have been a few things delivered.
If you’re not aware of CSS Houdini, it is a set of proposals and standards that allow access to lower-level aspects of the layout and CSS parser in web browser engines. It is basically an umbrella term used to describe a tonne of different API’s, some of which have already shipped and you might be familiar with.
CSS just continues to grow and evolve, much like its cousin Javascript. I thought I would share a few CSS layout properties that are still relatively unknown at the moment with developers. The first 3 are variations of almost the same thing, with the fourth being the most obscure and unsupported of them all.
place-items This one blows a lot of the minds of developers I’ve shown this too or told about. The place-items property is shorthand for align-items and justify-items CSS properties.
Some of you probably already knew this, but I only recently discovered this (accidentally) while building a wrapper around Postgresql queries in Node, and my mind is blown, to be honest.
Calling toString() on an array will automatically return the values within as a comma-separated string. Best of all, there will be no hanging comma and all whitespace is removed. Implementations based on join will have a space between the items, toString() on the array itself will not.
I was recently tasked with implementing pagination for an array of values (in some instances, over 2400 of them) and instead of using an existing library, I opted to write my own pagination logic and put it into an Aurelia value converter.
There are a lot of ways you can achieve this, you can use slice, you can use filter and reduce as well. The solution I ended up coming up with uses slice because it produces the easiest to read and simple code. Performance-wise, I do believe that filter comes out on top, but that isn’t our concern here.
Yes, I still play Pokemon Go and as the years have gone by, the game has only gotten better. A somewhat recent discovery for me is the fact the in-game search supports search strings. You can type in specific values into the search bar to filter Pokemon by region, whether they can be mega evolved and more specifically, their appraisal rating.
You know when you get your Pokemon appraised and you coloured bars, with 3 stars and filled bars meaning a 100% I.V rated Pokemon? Appraising one-by-one is frustrating and time-consuming, which is why I am delighted to discover that you can filter your Pokemon based on their appraisal rating.
The Firebase team has just released a new update for the Javascript SDK, version 7.21.0 in which a new feature was just added which will save anyone who uses Firestore possibly a lot of money.
In the update, the feature introduces two new where compatible query operators for filtering out data: not-in and !=.
not-in finds documents where a specified field’s value is not in a specified array. != finds documents where a specified field’s value does not equal the specified value. Neither query operator will match documents where the specified field is not present. Filtering in Firestore and Realtime Database has been notoriously limiting. You have to either query exactly what you want using where (say you want to get all items that have an active status). The ability to perform NOT IN clauses inside of traditional databases has been a staple for years, but notably absent in Firebase.