Code for this project is on GitHubWhile doing a full re-write of Droplr's iOS app for the 2.0 launch, I couldn't find any good file/image caches out there had a particular feature I really wanted: extending item expiration whenever it's touched.I set out to write my own — which wasn't that much of a challenge — but somewhere along the process I had this crazy idea that perhaps (SQLite-backed) Core Data would be a much better tool for the job:No mismatch between cache index file and actual data stored;Trivial querying;Nice and easy object oriented code.Being a structured data stor...

Planning to be an Intern in the Bay Area during Summer 2012? Make sure to read an Intern's Guide to the Bay Area, and join the 2012 Facebook group. (via this guy, via this guy) Joel Spolsky, from the Joel On Software blog and StackOverflow, wrote an article with Advice for Computer Science College Students back in '05. According to Joel, No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.As such: here’s everything you ever wanted to know about tech internships, plus some bloviating about my experience. The TL;DR is, try to have at least two internships: on...

Kent Nguyen has a great article about how building iOS apps takes a lot of work. And, here at Parse, we agree. Making a well-designed app is not a trivial task. Many non-developers hugely underestimate the amount of sweat and tears that goes into a single app.The big component that is overlooked and that Kent stresses is the server component. An app is not an island. Users expect their apps to richly interact with the internet.This means you need to worry about developing code on servers, communicating with servers, APIs, and a whole plethora of network issues.And this is the exact reason why ...

Last week’s violent government attack on the hugely popular site Megaupload — the U.S. government arresting Belgian citizens in New Zealand, of all places, and stealing at gunpoint servers bank accounts and property — has sent shock waves through the entire digital world.The first shock was the realization that the gigantic protest against legislative moves (SOPA and PIPA) that would smash the Internet turned out to be superfluous. The thing everyone wanted to prevent is already here. SOPA turns out not to be the unwelcome snake in the garden of free information. The snake...

This is the home page of project Kepler, an ongoing effort towards bringing compile-time metaprogramming to Scala. Our flavor of macros is reminiscent of Lisp macros, adapted to incorporate type safety and rich syntax. Unlike infamous C/C++ preprocessor macros, Scala macros: 1) are written in full-fledged Scala, 2) work with expression trees, not with raw strings, 3) cannot change syntax of Scala. You can learn more about our vision of metaprogramming from our talks. We propose to enrich Scala programming language with three flavors of type-safe compile-time macros: macro defs, macro types and...

PHP is widely used for various of web development. However, misconfigured server-side scripting would create all sorts of problem. And here are php security best practices that you should aware when configuring PHP securely. Nowadays most of the web servers are operated under Linux environment (like: Ubuntu, Debian...etc). Hence, in the following article, I am going to use list top 10 ways to enhance PHP Security Best Practices under Linux environment.My sample setup for PHP Security Tips:DocumentRoot: /var/www/Default Web server: Apache Default PHP configuration file: /etc/php.iniDefaul...

Takeaway: Ryan Boudreaux looks at some of the latest reports on how users are spending their time on the web. Keeping an eye on trends is one way for web developers to stay current.Recent figures in Internet activity include several interesting trends, including:the number of smartphone-user adoption ratesCyber Monday sales figuresmobile banking app usagesocial networking on mobile social mediahours spent onlinesearch habitsTrends in worldwide Internet activity may or may not translate well into changes and updates to an organization’s web development and design plans. As a result, many...

Over the last year and a half, I have worked with a small group of students and staff to create an excellent online learning community at Mendicant University. Unfortunately, because Mendicant is something that we’re intentionally scaling at a very slow pace, we won’t directly reach as many people as we’d like to any time soon.In this post, I’ve collected some of the things that I think contribute to making Mendicant University a great place to learn. I’d love to see these ideas integrated into more local and online groups, so that we can create a lot more gr...