Author: Matt Nedrich

Getting Started With React Native – Easy or Hard?

I’ve been watching React Native for a while. The idea of using a React (and Redux) approach to developing cross-platform-ish native apps is really appealing. Since I have no React Native experience, I wanted to understand how much work is required to get started. Read more on Getting Started With React Native – Easy or Hard?…

React Testing – Jest or Mocha?

Every React project is a little different. This can make choosing the right testing setup difficult.

Both Jest and Mocha seem to be popular within the React community. There are tons of folks using Jest, though others seem to prefer Mocha (for example, the Enzyme docs and examples use Mocha). So which one should you choose, and does it even matter?
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Parsing Excel Files with Ruby

In this post, I will review options for parsing Excel files using Ruby. I’ll discuss the different types of Excel files and introduce some of the Ruby libraries that exist for working with them. Note that I focus mostly on reading Excel files in this post, but there is some discussion around writing/updating them as well.
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A Guide to Interacting with iBeacons in iOS using Swift

I’ve recently been working on an iOS project that uses iBeacons. In this post, I’ll provide a comprehensive guide for working with iBeacons in iOS using Swift. I’ll describe what iBeacons are, how you can use them, and what you should know about the programming model for interacting with them in iOS. I’ll also share some of the best practices that I learned.
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Pixels and Palettes: Extracting Color Palettes From Images

Color palettes are usually carefully hand-selected to reflect a desired design aesthetic. Although there have been some attempts to procedurally generate palettes, automated palette creation is very difficult. It’s easy to choose some random colors, but generating a coherent and aesthetically pleasing palette in an automated way is not easy.
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Working with iOS Image Filters in Swift

I have always found image processing interesting and fun. However, despite having a decent amount of experience with it, I had never worked much with the tools for iOS. I decided to play around with them a bit, and to my delight, most of the iOS image processing libraries are incredibly simple to use. This topic has a lot of surface area, so I won’t be able to do it justice in a single post. However, this post should be enough to allow you to get started with image processing in iOS.
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Testing with Swift – Approaches & Useful Libraries

I’ve been working on developing an iOS app in Swift. It’s my first experience developing in pure Swift, without any Objective-C. This project has taught me a lot about the current state of testing in Swift, including different testing approaches and best practices. In this post, I’ll share some of my experiences and discuss how we have approached testing different types of Swift code. I’ll also talk about some useful testing libraries. Read more on Testing with Swift – Approaches & Useful Libraries…