Recently, the BBC published an article titled Why we’ve never fallen in love with virtual reality in which they discuss virtual realities lack of mainstream consumer adoption.
The article then goes on to talk about one VR segment that is thriving: group entertainment. Specifically, virtual reality arcades, theme parks leveraging virtual reality in rides and offering an affordable means of immersing yourself without getting into debt.
Truly immersive virtual reality experiences in 2020 are amazing. In countries like Tokyo, they have numerous public places where VR is employed for fun experiences. Disneyland has been showcasing the power of virtual reality for some time now.
When it comes to Firebase for newcomers, the first point of confusion in what is quite a simple platform is what should you choose for your database: Firestore or Realtime Database?
As someone who has been using Firebase for quite a few years, there was a time when Firestore never even existed. Initially, it used to just be Realtime Database and that was that. A couple of years ago, Firebase introduced the Firestore database which is the next evolution of databases on Firebase.
All signs are pointing to yes. System of A Down frontman Serj posted an image of himself in the studio working on what appears to be music for a System of A Down.
Many might be quick to say this could just be Serj working on more solo material, the hashtags tell a different story at the end, using the band’s name as a hashtag.
For years there has been rumour and speculation a new album is happening. Then various members speaking out about the band’s inability to get on the same page musically, could they have found a way to work past the problems they were happening?
When it comes to JavaScript frameworks, few can lay claim to the longevity of Ember which just turned eight years old. To give readers some perspective, Ember is about as old as AngularJS (the first version of Angular), older than React, older than Vue and many other options out there. It harks back to the days when IE6 was still a browser many of us had to support.
To the surprise of some who abandoned Ember (and JavaScript frameworks in general) years ago, Ember just released a large update which changes and improves Ember in many facets. For years, Ember has been trailing behind other frameworks and libraries. Even though updates were still being made, Ember has always felt like a relic of Web yesteryear.
Or is it already dead? The once-promising blockchain and beloved smart contract project seemed to be at the top of the world. From a high of $1431 in January 2018 to its current low of $126, it seems whatever hopes people have for Ethereum have faded quite a bit.
Despite the fact that Ethereum still holds the number two spot on Coin Market Cap Ethereum has fallen out of the limelight somewhat with developers. On State of The DApps, Ethereum accounts for only three of the top ten applications. Klaytn accounts for four of them, Steem accounts for two and NEO just one. In the top five, Ethereum only has one DApp.
Here is a nice bug-not-bug to close out in 2019. One of my Trello cards detailed what sounded like an error:
When toggling between two options (yes and no) in a dropdown, entering “y” changes to yes and quickly entering “n” does not switch to no. However, waiting a second you can change between them.
Some initial debugging suggested this was not actually a bug in our application. But, I knew if I was going to get the ticket closed off as not a bug, I had to have an explanation.
When working with mocks and spies in Jest, it is quite easy to fall into a trap where they become stale (especially in cases where pure functions are not being used). Heading to the documentation for Jest yields a lot of similar-looking methods for restoring mocks, clearing mocks and resetting mocks.
This is where confusion sets in. What is the best practice? Which ones should I call to ensure my tests don’t have stale mocks or spies? Even I struggled with this aspect.
People once thought the banking industry was too big to fail, some seriously big financial institutions ultimately proved that wrong during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/2009 which saw many seemingly unsinkable companies go out of businesses.
Early 2019, after two deadly crashes of the allegedly bigger and better 737 MAX, the plane was grounded by countries around the world as people scrambled to find answers for what happened. After numerous investigations, the culprit turned out to be MCAS also known by its non-abbreviated mouthful of a name Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.
Well, this is a pretty frustrating bug. The other day I and a few other people in my team noticed something peculiar while debugging some Javascript. The ability to hover over variables and function arguments in Chrome Developer Tools had stopped working.
At first, we thought this might have been a Webpack configuration issue or an update to one or more of our packages breaking the way in which Chrome parses our Javascript. The issue turned out to be Chrome itself. There is an issue recently created where many voice their frustration (myself included) over this bug.
In Aurelia 2, a new element called bindable has been introduced which is leveraged in HTML only custom elements. If you want a HTML only custom element which has one or more bindable properties, then you use the bindable element to specify them.
The ability to create bindables for HTML only custom elements existed in Aurelia 1, but was limited. The constraint being the bindable keyword had to be specified on the template element.