When the iPhone 4s was first released I was rather indifferent to what it offered over my trusty old iPhone 4, however, once they started to ship and people started talking about Siri it got me thinking how we could leverage this technology. One way that I identified was to leverage the built in reminders application [...]
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Posts by John
Last week I needed to implement some image resizing and optimising functionality to Luumin, something for handling images like avatars and previewing content. Having used ImageMagick for the last several years by calling the executable directly, it seemed like an opportune time to see what other libraries were available and what ones were able to [...]
Read the full articleLast night James and I attended the Auckland Web Meetup, a large gathering of web professionals ranging from designers to developers. The session covered just about every aspect of web related technology you could imagine. These meetups are becoming increasingly popular – last night alone there were 180 people in attendance with a short list [...]
Read the full articleI’ve been thinking about two things this week, but primarily about fastness. I’m referring to how we can make our code run faster in order to improve user experience, scalability and ensure that we get the most out of the resources that we have. While thinking about fastness I also ended up thinking about nothingness [...]
Read the full articleThe majority of our back-end development has been performed using PHP 5.3, which is a big step up from previous versions of PHP in terms of what the language now offers. However, sometimes despite all the work that the developers put in, there are things that don’t quite work the way you want them to. [...]
Read the full articleOne of the key areas I’ve been working on as part of the Luumin project is the underlying framework that glues everything together. One of the key parts of this framework is the persistence layer, or where we put stuff. As mentioned previously, we ultimately decided to settle on using Apache Cassandra for our primary [...]
Read the full articleBuilding a platform from scratch is a challenging task so the best place to start is at the beginning, creating a solid foundation before any code is written. We took this approach with Luumin, researching all of the tools, applications and development techniques that are currently being used to build web applications. Looking at how [...]
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