LATEST POSTS
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Introducing Galago Pro
I’ve recently switched from an Apple MacBook to a System76 Galago Pro with Ubuntu 17.04 as my personal computer. The reason why is to make some dots. My observation is that we are converging on Linux as a deployment target for cloud applications and with .NET Core able to run on Linux, I felt inspired…
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Looking at GameplayKit
Introduction This article explores the use of Entity Component System (ECS), Pathfinding and State Machine components in the GameplayKit Framework. I don’t make any claims of expertise on the topic of GameplayKit, other than I’m enjoying exploring an interesting topic that takes me through the fundamentals of Computer Science. Entity Component System I’ve done some…
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Hexagonal Tilemaps in SpriteKit
One of the new features added into iOS 10 and Xcode 8 is the SpriteKit Tilemap Editor. This editor provides a visual editing surface for SKTileMapNode which is described as ‘A node used to render a 2D array of textured sprites‘. The SKTileMapNode is represented as layers in the Tilemap and e.g. allows a building…
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Draw a Sparkline with D3
Overview A Sparkline is a kind of line chart, usually drawn without axes, placed inline with text e.g. with tabular data. It is the simplest of visualisations and an ideal entry into learning D3. This post discusses the visualisation of a Burndown chart as a Sparkline, built with Angular and D3. Data D3 means ‘Data…
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Deploy a React application to Heroku
Deploying the example React App to Heroku is performed using Git commands. After setting up on Heroku, you add Heroku as a remote in your git config. Git requires an SSH Key for secure communication with Heroku (see my article on Setup MacBook for node development). Deployment is then a push command. When Heroku receives…
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Exploring React, Less and Express
Learning React requires quite some knowledge of the modern JavaScript build pipeline (node.js especially), but it is worth exploring this gem of a technology. The usual approach to get skilled in React is to look through and run the starter projects available on GitHub, which reveal part of the problem in learning React, that it…
ABOUT
I’ve been working as an enterprise software engineer for more than 15 years, using the .NET platform and recently building for iOS with Swift. My degree is in Business Studies, majoring in information systems, where I learnt the fundamentals of software engineering for building systems for business.
Mark Brownsword 