Recently, I ran into a situation where I receive a list of objects in JSON from a REST endpoint. So far, this is nothing unusual and not a problem. However, the catch was that the objects were polymorphic and it was required to parse the child-class-specific fields. The previous solution …

I discovered this little trick a year ago and it was immensely helpful. So far, whenever I was working on my Android apps, I had to connect it to my laptop with a USB cable. The USB cable is annoying and limits my movements. Consequently, I was researching, if there …

I recently made the decision to purchase a MacBook Pro and with that comes Mac OS X. As a long-term Windows user that still is quite the change. I'm one of the people who never close applications and thus have tons of windows open. In Windows 7 or later this …

Currently, I'm working on a project which relies a lot on its notifications. So far, the logic was fairly simple: display the notification if there is already a notification, replace the previous one The code for that logic is to use the same ID when creating the notification: // constant notification …

In the last few sprints in our eat foody project we focused on improving the design. Especially on the Android app we had a lot of potential to take the design to a higher level. After we added a custom font (Source Sans Pro), gave the buttons and the actionbar …

Recently, I was refactoring some Jade views of an ExpressJS application which shared significant JavaScript code. The JavaScript part required some variables from the server. Generally, this can be done like this: script(type='text/javascript'). var user = !{JSON.stringify(userObject)}; Previously, the project had the following structure for many …

Just like the Android design and usage patterns, the development for the platform is going through some significant changes. The Google engineers revealed at last year's Google IO Android Studio, an IntelliJ-based IDE specialized for developing Android applications. But not just the IDE was a big upgrade over Eclipse. It …

Last week, we announced our open source boilerplates and promised an introductory blog post for the node.js server boilerplate. So here we go. As mentioned previously, we were getting annoyed with repeated implementations of account management. Even if a lot of it is just adding the excellent passport library …