Watching Avengers with Subtitles: A Lesson in Accessibility
Designing for accessibility not only helps those with special needs, but when done properly, it enriches the experience for everyone.
This Philly conference scans the horizon of what’s next in enterprise technology
This post was featured in Technically Philly on May 23, 2019. It was co-written by Chariot Solutions’ CMO Tracey Welson-Rossman, and Comcast’s Audrey Troutt. If you happened to be looking for your software development team on April 23 or 24, you may have noticed it was very quiet in that part of your office. That’s because more than 550 Philadelphia-area software developers and engineers were attending the Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise (ETE) conference. This conference has been taking…
Introduction to Android Activities with Kotlin
Ray Wenderlich’s tutorial covers one of the most important concepts within Android apps: Android activities. Read on for more.
Production iOS Push Notifications with AWS Simple Notification Service
In this post we’ll be setting up Amazon Web Services (AWS) to handle the delivery of push notifications to the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) and eventually to your users. In order to use AWS to push notifications to your users devices you’ll configure three different AWS Services; Cognito, Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Simple Notification Service (SNS). Cognito for authentication of API calls From the AWS console, launch the Cognito service. From there, select Manage Identity Pools. …
Talks We’re Most Looking Forward to at ETE 2019
Our Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference (Philly ETE) returns for its 12th year after taking a year off. The conference itself started after the Chariot team had nine speakers at Java One, which at that time in 2003 many companies had cut back on travel due to the economic downturn. Technology changes very quickly, which is one of the reasons continuous learning is so important to our consultants. We felt it was important to share what we had…
Swift 4 and PromiseKit
Having spent years in AngularJS, using promises to wrap asynchronous calls became an almost daily occurrence. I loved the way asynchronous code could be quickly and easily encapsulated with a quick promise using the $q library. When I made the jump to iOS and Swift, I was left wondering how I could continue working with promises and asynchronous code. Enter PromiseKit. While PromiseKit isn’t as intuitive as $q, it is every bit as capable and powerful but with its own…
IoT Evolution Conference Recap
Current estimates reveal that more than 100 million new devices are connected to the Internet — every second. It is no surprise then that predictions show that the installed base of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is forecasted to grow to between 25-30 Billion devices by 2020. These devices are everywhere: in our homes, in our cars, in our businesses and industrial sites, and in our cites. Expected spending for the IoT economy is in the trillions over the next…
A Simple Neural Network to Classify Slack Messages
Over the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with some basic machine learning. My task was to create a classifier for Slack messages. The application would be a slackbot that takes an input sentence and responds with whichever channel it believes the message should belong to. My bot only looks at three channels: #food, #fun, and #random. However, it can be easily extended to work with any number of channels. The Network Let’s take a look at the 3-layer neural…
Terraform
At the time of this writing the main AWS landing page lists twenty product categories, under which is an overwhelming number of resources to be deployed and configured. All resources can be created and configured via the collection of AWS consoles (the web UIs) and while this is probably the simplest option it does not make resource creation reversible or easily repeatable, nor does it allow for easy tracking of changes to infrastructure. It’s best to have a repeatable, visible…
Rewriting Your Mobile App: Short-term Sacrifice for Long-Term Gain
Introduction At Chariot Solutions, we have been developing mobile apps since the release of the first iOS SDK in early 2008. Back then, all app development was new. A lot of developers flocked to mobile development as the new shiny object. As is the case with all new software development stacks, some apps were developed better than others. After a few years of this, mobile development projects weren’t always about developing new apps. A good number of projects were around…