Introduction

Flutter has been rising in popularity since the initial release of 1.0 back in late 2018. As companies and entrepreneurs struggle to keep development costs low, the search continues for better and more efficient ways to build mobile apps and cross-platform software in general. Flutter supports all major mobile platforms and support for web and all major desktop operating systems is well under development.

In this article, we’ll check out a simple beat machine demo, and learn about the underlying design patterns used in the development of this app.

To get a Flutter environment up and running, visit the installation…

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…

Using SVG for Icons

Scalable Vector Graphics is a great language for creating icon assets for web, mobile, and more. In this article, we will briefly review the syntax of SVG and explore how the circle and arc functions can be used to create gears.

Icons created with SVG can be used directly in many applications and may also be converted into PNG or other formats with utilities such as the ImageMagick convert command-line tool. This makes SVG very useful and efficient for producing a wide variety of graphic assets.

SVG Syntax

The syntax of SVG will be familiar to anyone with experience in HTML since…

Introduction

This article expands on Part I and Part II of this series (covering schema, security, and type definitions) with the creation of a REST API framework that will facilitate development of REST endpoints.

The framework is designed to reduce boilerplate code, allow for ease of maintenance and feature development, and integrate with underlying features developed in PL/pgSQL. Common requirements such as REST URL parsing, serialization, and authentication are built into classes that can either be extended to leverage functionality, or applied to methods on other classes to change the input, output, or other behavior using annotations.

This approach leverages concepts…

What is Success?

To get an idea of what a successful mindset is, a root concept of “success” must be defined. This is different for everyone, but for simplicity we will define a basic set of requirements:

1. The freedom to make one’s own choices in every aspect of one’s life
2. Possession of whatever resources are necessary to facilitate #1

If you ask a few people around Earth to describe their ideal life, there is a good chance it fits the description above. Many people want a beautiful house, a nice car, maybe a farm, garden, shop, or other kind of property to engage…

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…

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 with built-in security and privacy features. In this article, we will examine the next phase in the bottom-up design of this application: the data model library.

By defining models in a common library, integrity can be maintained between the data models and the underlying DB schema in one convenient location, allowing any number of components in the future to be built, with compile-time type safety for increased reliability.

The data models reflect the schema as expected, and provide convenient methods for…