Kaixo!

The language of the Basques, called Euskara, is spoken by about 700,000 people around the world, primarily around the Bay of Biscay in the area between NW Spain and SW France, known as the Basque Country. There are several dialects, each with unique properties that reflect the local culture, along with a standardized form called batua developed by the Basque Language Academy in the 1960's.

Euskara is an agglunative ergative-absolutive language in which syllables are “glued” together to create words on-the-fly that describe agents, in a manner that is often loosely compared to subject-object verb order. Examples of other agglunative languages include Inuktitut (Inuit), Japanese, and Korean. …

Within the span of 20 years, social media has grown from the hobby of a small group of enthusiasts to a part of everyday life for billions of people. Occasionally, we hear about a data breach or even a corporate transaction in which our personal data was shared with others, and many people are surprised at how such a thing could happen so often.

We use these apps and services because we want to stay connected with others, informed, and entertained. …

Introduction

In the previous article of this series, we looked at the underlying SQL schema for the social network demo project and the built-in security and privacy features included. In this article, we will examine the next phase in the bottom-up design of the social network: the data model library.

By defining models in a common library, integrity can be maintained between the data models used and the underlying database schema in one convenient location, allowing any number of application components in the future to be easily designed in a compatible and efficient way, with compile-time type safety for greatly increased reliability. …

Success is Work

When we think of success, we often think of the products of success, such as having a lot of money or having the freedom to travel at will and see new places. While these things are great and are indeed a part of success, that’s not all there is to it, and it wouldn’t mean much to succeed without the work behind it and understanding why it’s important.

True success comes having the desire and passion to go after something and work at it endlessly until the desired results are achieved, and then continue working at it to get increasingly better results. There’s no marker for when success is reached other than those we set for ourselves. …

Introduction

Social networks have become a part of daily life for many people around the world today. In this article, we will check out the first step in the design of a very basic social network: creating the database schema.

A social network is a perfect use case for bottom-up design, since we can define security and required behaviors in a robust and scalable way. This allows future upgrades to be largely non-breaking while being relatively easy to implement and maintain.

This social network will feature standard email/password authentication, uploading images, setting a profile photo, posting content (with optional image), and following other users. …

“I’m gonna be really successful someday…”

I’ve always told myself this in times of turmoil and unrest, such as a soul-shaking career or relationship change, and while it’s great to have big aspirations in life, there’s only one problem with this statement: just when is someday going to come? And besides that, what does “being successful” really mean, anyway?

Okay, that’s two problems, and that just further illustrates my point. What exactly is this elusive target off in the distance, and would I even know what it looks like?

This sort of thinking will always hold you back in life, and here’s…

Introduction

The TypeScript language provides many features that make it a great choice for audio engineering, which is challenging and requires attention to detail (with clearly audible results when things go wrong).

In this article, we’ll look at how to build a music synthesizer in TypeScript, complete with a keyboard, note readout, oscilloscope, and two oscillators with gain, detune, and delay features, using a few of the many features provided by the Web Audio API for creating and processing sound.

For a copy of the example app source code, clone this repo. …

Introduction

Look under the hood of any framework, SDK, or complex application and you may find anything from an engineering marvel to something resembling a box of old cables sitting in the attic since 1999. While the choice of tools used certainly has something to do with this, professionals will get pro results from almost any tool, even if it takes longer and is more frustrating when using something less ideal.

As applications grow in size and complexity, code bases often become harder to read and maintain, and years of change requests and updates can result in a highly fragmented and difficult to understand architecture. What starts out as a fairly straightforward concept soon becomes difficult to manage, and large amounts of resources become necessary to build and maintain features with increasingly less return on investment. …