What we'll build?

A simple web app called The Background App. It'll be just a canvas colored with a default color. We'll be able to manipulate the color by passing it as a parameter in the URL of the browser.

Why is this useful? Sometimes I want to grab screenshots of certain on-screen elements and have a specific color fill as background. So the use case will be that we'll go to that web app, set the desired color, and bring the elements we want to capture on top. …

The Open Location Code (OLC) is a geocoding system developed by Google that was released in October 2014. Location codes created by the OLC system are referred to as Plus Codes. These codes are supported by Google Maps search since August 2015.

Plus Codes are designed to be used like street addresses and can be useful in places where there is no formal system to identify buildings, such as street names, house numbers, and postcodes.

In the following examples, we'll use Google's global headquarters location.

The latitude and longitude for their headquarters are 37.422062, -122.08406.

The mail address is 1600…

MagSafe is one of the new things that Apple unveiled with its iPhone 12 line-up in late 2020.

This technology created a special category of accessories from Apple or third-party manufacturers. This is how we got the iPhone MagSafe Charger, wallets, the colorful cases, car mounts, and many others.

The MagSafe Charger is one of the new accessories from Apple that uses this "innovative" technology.

“The MagSafe Charger makes wireless charging a cinch.”

I have the charger for more than a week. Using it wasn't disappointing but it could be better.

The charger just snaps firmly in place and it…

My website is almost as simple as it gets, having just 2 "pages": home and contact.

I quoted pages because there the website is actually a SPA with 2 views. I built it a couple of years ago and used PicoCMS and its out-of-the-box Astral theme for that.

It is more like a business card where people can see the services provided by the Constanting sole proprietorship and they can get in contact if they require my services.

The website is responsive having a layout for mobile devices and one for the rest.

I'll provide the project code at the…

This example is provided as a FlutterPen and I won’t detail how to create a Flutter app. Instead, I will explain the code that manages the state as a decimal value using bitwise operators like AND, OR, or NOT.

Control movement

We’ll alter a state using the WASD keys (or the equivalent arrow keys ⇧⇦⇩⇨) and use that state to move an object on the screen.

That object will be a logo and its default position will be centered on the screen. …

Mankind evolved, slowly I might say, from number system to number system and, for now, most of us adopted and use the decimal system in our everyday life.

There are many other numeral systems that we still use for specific tasks and some that are long forgotten.

We'll go through some of them.

An additive numeral system

We’ll start with the Roman numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages.

It is an additive system and has 7 symbols (I, V, X, L, C, D, and M corresponding in…

All your base are belong to us

If you're a programmer, you may already have some notions of numeral systems and you've interacted with a couple of them.

If not, then it'll be a bit harder to feel at home going forward and it may help to get familiar:

For understanding the following example, it is very important to understand the binary system and its operators. In it, we’ll use only the & (AND) and ^ (XOR) operators. AND will be used to determine whether a particular bit is 1 or 0. XOR will be used to switch particular bits between 1 and 0.

There are 10…

FLUTTERING DART

What is it?

Null safety is the guarantee within an object-oriented programming language that the object references will never have null values.

That translates into 0 "chances" of getting a null reference error. So no more unexpected application crashes caused by this "billion-dollar mistake", as Tony Hoare called the invention of the null pointer.

Currently, JetBrain’s Kotlin and Apple’s Swift are the ones of the most popular programming languages that use null-safe types by default. Soon, Google’s Dart will join the select club.

How will it work?

The types in our code will be considered non-nullable by default. …