by Jon Holtan
Over a third of software developers use cross-platform mobile frameworks such as Flutter to develop mobile applications. Sure, you might be drawn to the allure of native app development because it’s what big companies use, but unless your app needs access to native functionality, it’s essential to evaluate whether the return is worth the investment.
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by Drew De Ponte
Git was created by Linus Torvalds out of a need. At the time the Linux Kernel team was using a proprietary Distributed Source Control Management (DSCM) system. However, due to licensing issues the Linux Kernel team could no longer use this proprietary DSCM system. Therefore, Linus decided to build Git as the DSCM system he
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by Drew De Ponte
Woot woot! The first couple releases of the year are out 🎉. These releases include major features as well as important bug fixes. iOS Pullwalla iOS has always helped you discover and examine pull requests you want to review across all your accounts & repositories. This release marks the beginning of a new era where
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by Drew De Ponte
I just released Git Patch Stack v0.5.0. To update simply run the following: brew update && brew upgrade git-ps What’s Changed? Multiple Stacks of Patches? This release makes it so that Git Patch Stack now works with any branch that has an upstream branch, instead of having the patch stack be limited to the previously
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by Drew De Ponte
Hello! I wanted to clue you into some details around a few recent releases. macOS Pullwalla macOS v2.6.0 & v2.6.1 both address the following items. macOS Big Sur Support As I am sure you already know. macOS Big Sur was officially released. With it comes a completely new style that makes macOS Apps feel a
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by Jon Holtan
On mobile (Android, iOS), developers have to ask the user to access certain runtime features. These permissions typically include the user’s location, the user’s contacts, or a plethora of others. Generally, when we think of cross-platform, we think of one size fits all plugins. This approach is anticipated in the Flutter plugin ecosystem. However, when
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by Matthew New
In March, when the whole world changed forever, Business Insider reported that startups in Silicon Valley were about to face the most difficult and biggest crisis of our generation. And, an NFIB Research Center study revealed that nearly half of all small businesses planned to be affected by the pandemic. A lot has happened since
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by Adam Korman
Product discovery is a process that, at its core, helps us to understand what customers are looking for, identify gaps in the current market, and how to realize the unique value proposition that will make for a great product. Because the development process of an app or any kind of software is expensive, it’s essential
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by Matthew New
Whether you have a vision for a new fintech app or need help implementing unique solutions to track user behavior on your website, it’s going to be essential to find the right software development partner. Shopping around for the right software partner becomes even more daunting and stressful if you’re a non-technical founder with little
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by Matthew New
Who is Float? Float is an emerging fintech startup headed by Max Ukropina, aiming to revolutionize how people can view, monitor, and share their credit scores. The app, available on iOS and Android devices, lets users track their VantageScore credit score, but it also gives them total control over how they share that information with
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by Drew De Ponte
For years, like many others, we have maintained CHANGELOG.md files inside our Git repositories for our apps and libraries. We have followed the standards outlined at keepachangelog.com and we have appreciated the benefits it has provided us for preparing releases and for maintaining a clear record of changes included in each release while still being
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by Ryan Hedges
If you don’t already know, UpTech has created a Mac App to help teams stay connected through photos. It’s a very useful app and it has provided us a lot of fun and comradery as we use it every day. As the application has gained adoption, we’ve received feedback from users that they’d would like
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by Drew De Ponte
Hello! You’re receiving this email because you subscribed to updates for Pullwalla. Your unified pull request manager. Where are we at? We are happy to share with you that since the last email update we have made some very significant changes. These are all available now in the releases in the App Stores. Now on
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by Philip Johnson
Pra is now Pullwalla! The app that began as a command line tool named Pra has made the next step in its journey with a new name and new features. The goal remains the same: Pullwalla is designed to be a single, unified interface that allows you to easily manage all the pull requests you
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by Drew De Ponte
Version v1.4.0 of Pra just made it to the App Store. This release was focused on reliability and robustness. The last release was focused more heavily on new features. If you missed that checkout the Pra v1.3.0 post. Reliability After the v1.3.0 release I quickly got feedback that there were some reliability issues. First there
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by Drew De Ponte
This release includes a mix of foundational features, small improvement features, as well as some bug fixes, performance improvements, etc. Ignore Organizations We added the ability to Ignore Organizations in addition to already being able to ignore a repository. This is an extemely useful feature that can help you gain focus by ignoring pull requests
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by Adam Korman
It starts innocently enough… an exec asks: ”Shouldn’t our product do X?” Why, yes! Of course it should. It’s not a bad idea, and on the surface it doesn’t seem like a heavy lift to build. So the team starts talking about the new feature in our standup meeting (product owner, developers, dev manager, and
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by Ryan Hedges
I recently had the privilege of representing UpTech to the students at LearningFuze by presenting my thoughts and experiences surrounding finding a job as a developer. We had such a great time talking with the students and received some great feedback on how the presentation helped them. “Your tips for finding a job were very
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by Drew De Ponte
It is Sunday, Feb 17th, 2019 at 10:58 pm and I have just submitted the Minimal Free Version of Pra to the Apple App Store for review. I post in our team Slack channel that I’ve submitted and I cross my fingers as we wait for Apple to respond. Minimal Free Version It is probably
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by Drew De Ponte
This is the first status update of the Pra macOS application. I figured what better time to do this than right after 2018 ends and 2019 begins. My goal with this is to give you an idea of where I am with the development, give you some insight into the things I am doing and
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by Ryan Hedges
You might find yourself in an situation where you want to use the UINavigationBar API to create a navigation bar in one of your views. But it doesn’t look quite right. It doesn’t extend up behind the status bar like you’ve seen it do countless times before when using a UINavigationController. What gives? How do
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by Drew De Ponte
While I am waiting to collect information from the survey, I started thinking about how I could make money with Pra. I thought about it before at a high level. But now I have started thinking about it in more depth. Expectations It is important to understand that my expectations aren’t that this product be
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by Drew De Ponte
Back in 2013, I was lead of a software development team at ReachLocal, Inc. At the time we were using GitHub for open source projects and Atlassian Stash for our private Git repositories. We required at least one reviewer to review each pull request before it could be merged into the mainline. We also generally
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by Drew De Ponte
Why? Sizing and Optimizing images for iOS can have a huge impact on performance of your app and the overall user experience. Therefore, it is important to take the time to figure out the proper sizing for your images and to make sure that they get appropriately resized and optimized for your needs. Understanding your
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by Matthew New
One of our clients, 8i is a software development company focusing on creating lifelike humans in mixed reality. As part of a new product initiative, they developed a new, low-cost studio for capturing people’s holograms outside of their office. To test product market fit, they deployed a stage at a Ready Player One party at
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by Drew De Ponte
Today, I was working on a client project. As usual a couple of designers had done some high fidelity designs in Sketch that I was riffing off. In the designs on the Sign Up screen near the bottom there was the classic notice stating that by signing up you are agreeing to the User Agreement
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by Drew De Ponte
I believe that there is a large gap in current development practices in terms of association of identity and source code. This is something that a large percentage of people have been ignoring for quite some time. I was one of those people until recently. I started asking myself the question: How hard would it
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by Drew De Ponte
The Problem Given that UpTech is a consultancy, our team is often pretty fragmented in terms of physical location. For example, I might be on-site at a client’s office while another member is at a different client’s office, and yet other members are at our office. This physical fragmentation makes it difficult to stay on
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by Drew De Ponte
This is yet another screencast I dug up while cleaning out some of the digital clutter. This one provides a great basic walk through of outside in development despite using a sligtly older version of RSpec. The biggest difference in RSpec versions at this point is the way expections are written. In this screencast it
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by Drew De Ponte
This is another screencast I dug up while cleaning out some of the digital clutter in my life. This one still provides a great basic walk through of how to properly define acceptance tests and use them to drive out code with Cucumber. Your browser does not support the video element. Please upgrade/switch to a
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by Drew De Ponte
Back in 2013 I did a series of screencasts with a good friend of mine, Brian Miller. I was going through things trying to remove some of the digital clutter and noise in my life. In the process I found this screencast and realized it is still very applicable today. Therefore, I figured I might
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by Drew De Ponte
Let’s say you run into a scenario where you need to build a mobile interface that has tabs at the top of the screen. If you are working on Android this isn’t too much of a problem as it is natively supported and part of their Material Design. If you are building an iOS app
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