Software Engineering

Coding, Python, web development, architecture, and deployment

  • Playing With Node.js

    When exploring ways to build a good chat server there are an overwhelming number of options. The old way of doing things with polling the server for new messages was simply not an option but the alternatives are a little scary.  Using a SQL database seemed a bit overkill for just posting messages. In the…

  • What to do with a Raspberry Pi

    I’m trying to think of some ideas for what to do with a Raspberry Pi. There’s just so many things that people have done with these little $35 computers that it is overwhelming to think of what to do with one. Here’s a list of ideas I’ve scoured from the web: Webcam server Vehicle tracking…

  • Good Christmas Break

    It was a nice relaxing week off for christmas this year. Having friends around to host parties made everything more festive. The week was bitterly cold with a streak of -30 degree temperatures for the week. It made the deepfried Christmas turkey a bit harder to cook. Thankfully the cold snap is over for now…

  • A Live Text Chat Server

    I’m facing the challenge of building a live chat server for use in a mobile app. It is an interesting bit of code to write and I’m finding myself learning a few new things to get it working. My first thought was to build it using websockets over HTTP but that looked too difficult to…

  • A Productive Christmas Break?

    There’s just so much work to be done that I’m really going to have to strive for a very productive month of programming. I need to update all my apps for the new year and hopefully launch a few new ones. To that end I’m planning on taking some more time off work over the…

  • Progress on New Game

    So the new game is going to be called Tycho City. It’s based on building a lunar base and battling other bases for the moon’s valuable resources. There’s a mix of two styles of gameplay the first is the simulation of the moon base with building and upgrading mines and energy collectors. The second is…

  • iAd Download Script

    Unfortunately Apple doesn’t have a nice easy API for downloading your revenue numbers from iAds. The only way around that right now is screen scraping the information, or manually downloading the reports. Thanks to the awesome python requests library I was able to put something together in just 50 lines of code. It’s a function…

  • Winter Bike Riding

    So I decided that rather than paying for driving/parking to get to work this winter I am going to bike. I picked up a cheap bike from canadian tire last night that should be able to survive the -30 degree temperatures outside and should be sturdy enough to not break down on the 6KM ride…

  • Loading iOS Assets From The Web

    One of the big challenges with making a big iPhone game is that to do the graphics justice at the caliber expected by gamers these days is hard. There’s just too much data to package the iPhone/Retina iPhone/4 inch iPhone/iPad/Retina iPad assets all together in one bundle. So for my latest game I’m kicking things…

  • Creating a Resource Management Game on iOS

    Over the last week I’ve been trying to reverse engineer some of the hit games on iOS like DragonVale, Pocket Planes, Tiny Tower, Simpsons Tap Out and Paradise Cove. These have been historically some of the most profitable games on the App Store. They are complex resource management type games and I want to create…