Built and Deployed an Amber app in 2 days

Yesterday night, I deployed my first Amber app to production. It’s a JSON hosting service for your mobile and web apps. I call it JSON Keeper. The app is very simple and straightforward right now. It only has one screen with no user accounts. You simply go to the site,…

Why I am not going to attend Hackathons any more

There was a Hackathon by our local government a few days back and the whole situation was insane. They almost brought me to tears. It was a 36-hour Hackathon and it felt like torture for the participants. Some of them fainted, some of burned out, and I could see the…

Now you can issue wildcard certificates from Let’s Encrypt

Let’s Encrypt, the free Certificate Authority has announced that it now supports issuing wildcard certificates for your domains. Wildcard certificates will be issued only through the ACMEv2 protocol. You might need to update your client before it supports it. What are Wildcard Certificates? Wildcard certificates allow you to secure all…

Monitor SSL Certificates Expiration

I love Let’s Encrypt. It’s a simple tool which helps you automate process of renewing certificates, and for free! It’s great if you’re using managed hosting and your provider takes care of this automation, but if you’re using a VPS like me, the process sometimes fails randomly. This happens mostly…

Open Source Swift app

I have been meaning to contribute open source code since a long time now. I want to see my Github streaks go green too. Every time I decide to contribute, I get stuck because I don’t know about repositories where I can help. Or how to help the complex open…

Polymorphic Associations in Rails Explained

Polymorphic Associations allow you to create a single model and let it “belong to” multiple models. Allow me to explain how they work. I wanted to have a single Photo model, which can be used for thumbnails, employees, product, etc. for the practice management app that I am working on….

How do I get a job as a developer without experience?

Finding a job as a self taught developer, or as a fresher looks daunting. Almost all the companies are only looking for experienced people, and how will you get any experience if you don’t get a job? This catch-22 has been catching people’s imagination for long time now. It has…

Why is a Software bug called a bug?

As a software engineer, I have been trained to call any problem with my software as a software bug. These are annoying little things which me as a developer had overlooked during programming, or made a mistake in understanding the requirements, or just straight up errors in code. Most of…

Android Sync Adapter: Implementation to Sync Manually

In my last post, I showed how to implement an Android Account Manager, which utilizes the internal Android’s system for managing user accounts. Once you’ve implemented that, you are ready to take your app to the next level with Android Sync Adapter (SyncAdapter). What is Android Sync Adapter? A SyncAdapter…