“In October 1958, Physicist William Higinbotham created what is thought to be the first video game. It was a very simple tennis game, similar to the classic 1970s video game Pong, and it was quite a hit at a Brookhaven National Laboratory open house” (aps.org). 63 years have passed, and video games are prolific.

The company Pragma provides a backend game engine that enables developers to create multiplayer and social games. Pragma’s features are divided into three broad categories: cross platform accounts to connect players, Game Loop, which is lobby, matchmaking, game allocation, and end of match processing, and storing, saving, and updating accounts, inventory, progression, and related data.

In this episode we talk with Eden Chen, CEO and Co-Founder of Pragma.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Flutter is a UI toolkit developed by Google that helps developers build natively compiled applications for mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices from a single code base. Development is fast because the screen “hot reloads” as you develop, the architecture is layered for fast and expressive designs, and its widgets incorporate all critical platform differences such as scrolling, navigation, icons and fonts.

In this episode we talk about developing Flutter apps with Allen Wyma. Allen is a Founder of Plangora, a web and mobile development company that specializes in PHP, iOS with Swift, android with Java, WordPress, and Flutter. Allen is also an Elixir Mix Panelist at Devchat.tv where he interviews members of the Elixir community. We discuss Native app development and developing with Flutter.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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The typical procedure many companies follow to reach production-level code is design the program, code and test it in different environments, and put it in a pipeline to deploy to production. Developers can make it pretty far into building their core features before inevitably breaking to include enterprise features and security standards like Single Sign On, Okta security and authorization for different user groups, Workday integrations, etc…. Including these requirements can put stress on a team with newer developers or limited resources. For some large projects, these standards need months to fully build out and test. 

The company WorkOS is dramatically shortening the time it takes to make applications enterprise ready so that developers and IT teams can focus on the application itself. WorkOS provides developer-minded tools like RESTful endpoints, JSON responses, framework-native SDKs, and a developer dashboard, among other tools, to integrate otherwise complicated enterprise standards in just a few lines of code. Their mission is to simplify building applications for enterprise users so that developers can focus on creating core features in a timely manner. 

In this episode, Michael Grinich (@grinich) discusses the process of building enterprise applications, the challenges of modern security and administrative requirements, and how WorkOS is solving those issues.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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WordPress is a free and open-source content management system, or CMS, written in PHP. Since its release in 2003, WordPress has become ubiquitous on the web. It is estimated that roughly 60 million websites use WordPress as a CMS. However, despite its popularity, WordPress has limitations in its design. WordPress sites are dynamic, and the front and back end are tightly coupled. A dynamic, full-stack application can be useful when handling complex functionality, but it also slows down the site and opens up security vulnerabilities. 

Strattic is a static site generator and hosting platform that specializes in converting WordPress sites into a static architecture. Static pages are isolated from the backing application, improving security against common WordPress vulnerabilities. Modern web users have high expectations for speed and security, and Strattic helps WordPress sites achieve this without sacrificing the benefits of the WordPress platform.

Zeev Suraski is the CTO of Strattic. Zeev is one of the architects and principal authors of the PHP language, which is the foundation of WordPress. Zeev joins the show today to talk about the place of PHP in modern web development, and how Strattic helps WordPress developers build modern, fast, and secure sites.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Rust and Golang are two of the newest lower level languages for doing systems programming. They are often used for applications such as file systems, operating systems, and latency-sensitive applications. How do they compare in terms of safety, speed, and programming ergonomics? Linhai Song is an assistant professor and researcher at Penn State University, and joins the show to talk about his work researching Go and Rust.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Originally published March 6, 2020

ReactJS developers have lots of options for building their applications, and those options are not easy to work through. State management, concurrency, networking, and testing all have elements of complexity and a wide range of available tools. Take a look at any specific area of JavaScript application development, and you can find highly varied opinions.

Kent Dodds is a JavaScript teacher who focuses on React, JavaScript, and testing. In today’s episode, Kent provides best practices for building JavaScript applications, specifically React. He provides a great deal of advice on testing, which is unsurprising considering he owns TestingJavaScript.com. Kent is an excellent speaker who has taught thousands of people about JavaScript, so it was a pleasure to have him on the show.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Originally published July 7, 2017

Airbnb is a company that is driven by design. New user interfaces are dreamed up by designers and implemented for web, iOS, and Android. This implementation process takes a lot of resources, but it used to take even more before the company started using React Native. React Native allows Airbnb to reuse components effectively.

React Native works by presenting a consistent model for the user interface regardless of the underlying platform, and emitting a log of changes to that user interface. The underlying platform translates those changes into platform specific code.

Leland Richardson is an engineer at Airbnb. In today’s episode, he explains how Airbnb uses React Native, how React Native works, and the future of the platform.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post React Native Interfaces with Leland Richardson (Repeat) appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Originally published December 20, 2018

Ten years ago, there was a distinction between “backend” and “frontend” developers. A backend developer would be managing the business logic and database transactions using Ruby on Rails or Java. A frontend developer would be responsible for implementing designs and arranging buttons using raw HTML and JavaScript.

Today, developers can build entire applications in JavaScript. Developers who spent their early career developing frontend JavaScript skills are finding themselves with a surprising amount of power. With NodeJS providing a backend framework and React, Vue, or Angular on the frontend, a single JavaScript developer can write all the code for a whole application—hence the rise of the “full stack developer”.

At the same time, the cloud infrastructure is becoming easier to use. Backend-as-a-service simplifies the frustrations of deploying your application, and standing up a database. GraphQL improves the relationship between the frontend and the backend. And futuristic technologies like WebAssembly and web virtual reality are promising to make a JavaScript engineer’s life even more interesting.

Adam Conrad is an engineer and a writer for Software Engineering Daily. In recent articles, he has documented the changing nature of the frontend, including JavaScript engines, virtual reality, and how mature corporations are using React and GraphQL. He joins the show to share his perspective on what is changing in the frontend—and how full stack JavaScript engineers can position themselves for future success in a quickly changing market.

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Originally published March 31, 2017

Brendan Eich created the first version of JavaScript in 10 days. Since then JavaScript has evolved, and Brendan has watched the growth of the web give rise to new and unexpected use cases.

Today Brendan Eich is still pushing the web forward across the technology stack with his involvement in the WebAssembly specification and the Brave browser.

For all of its progress, JavaScript struggles to run resource-intensive programs like complex video games. With JavaScript falling short on its charge to be the “assembly language for the web” the four major browser vendors started collaborating on the WebAssembly project to allow programming languages a faster, lower level compile target when deploying to the web.

Brendan is the CEO of Brave which aims to provide a faster and safer browsing experience by blocking ads and trackers by default in a new browser. The Brave browser is also helping publishers monetize in interesting new ways while also giving a share of ad revenue to its users.

Caleb Meredith is the host of this show. He previously guest hosted a popular episode on Inferno, a fast, React-like JavaScript framework. As we bring on more guest hosts, please send us feedback. We want to know what every host is doing well, and what we can improve on.

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Originally published July 27, 2018

React Native allows developers to reuse frontend code between mobile platforms. A user interface component written in React Native can be used in both iOS and Android codebases. Since React Native allows for code reuse, this can save time for developers, in contrast to a model where completely separate teams have to create frontend logic for iOS and Android.

React Native was created at Facebook. Facebook itself uses React Native for mobile development, and contributes heavily to the open source React Native repository.

In 2016, Airbnb started using React Native in a significant portion of their mobile codebase. Over the next two years, Airbnb saw the advantages and the disadvantages of adopting the cross platform, JavaScript based system. After those two years, the engineering management at Airbnb came to the conclusion to stop using React Native. Gabriel Peal is an engineer at Airbnb who was part of the decision to move off of React Native. Gabriel wrote a blog post giving the backstory for React Native at Airbnb, and he joins the show to give more detail on the decision.

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