SwiftUI Dark Mode Demystified: A Guide for Total Beginners

With the introduction of the Dark Mode feature in macOS Mojave in September 2018, and later in iOS and all other platforms, Apple started opening the doors to developers to allow users to have a certain degree of control over the appearance of their apps. Since then, the momentum seems to be continuing forward, as SwiftUI has made the process to make apps compliant with Dark Mode features even simpler. If you have no experience with Dark Mode or the new workflow for implementing this feature with SwiftUI, then check out this post by Juan Reyes on Waldo blog. 

React Native Scrollview 101: The Best Practices Guide

When mobile apps abruptly clip off content from the screen, it’s a sign of bad UX for developers. Moreover, not being able to scroll through your app’s screen could be confusing for your users. Luckily, scrolling containers provide a reliable solution to this problem. This post presents a deep and comprehensive guide on React Native’s scrolling containers, which are called ScrollViews. You’ll understand what they are, write them in code, and explore some best practices with practical examples. Find out more from Siddhant Varma on Waldo blog.

SwiftUI Picker Made Easy: Tutorial With Example

The purpose of this article is to get you acquainted with SwiftUI Picker. In the process, we’ll be creating a sample code, customizing the appearance of our Picker, and implementing some functionality with them. Once you have completed this article, you’ll be able to implement your own pickers in Xcode and prove the quality of your work with some basic testing procedures. Get started in this post from Juan Reyes on Waldo blog. 

Run a React Native App on an Android Device or Emulator

React Native is a mobile development framework for building cross-platform apps that run and feel truly native on both iOS and Android. With React Native, you can choose to test run your app either on an emulator or on a physical device. In this post, we’ll walk through all the initial setup required to set a suitable development environment. After that, we’ll look at how to run an example React Native app on the emulator and on a physical Android device. We’ll close with learning how to test run React Native apps created using the Expo CLI and also how to test React Native apps using a tool known as Waldo. Find out more in this piece from Pius Aboyi on Waldo blog.

A Complete Guide to Binding in SwiftUI

This article intends to introduce you to SwiftUI Bindings and the different aspects of SwiftUI View workflows using them. Then, we’ll work on creating a View implementing simple bindings and add some testing to confirm our work.Moreover, once you complete the instructions in this article, you will have a project with all you need to know about binding in it. Let Juan Reyes guide you through it all on Waldo blog.

Hofstadter’s Law: What It Is and What It Means for Planning

DevOps teams across the board are under enormous pressure to shorten software development cycles and pump out more and more releases. By doing so, they’re delivering more value to their users, continuously leveraging their feedback to inform their product roadmap. Unfortunately, shipping software is often easier said than done. In many cases, there is a massive disconnect between managers and developers regarding project timeframes. Learn all about Hofstadter’s law from Justin Reynolds on Plutora’s blog.

Single Source of Truth (SSOT): Definition and Examples

Your product is creating a buzz in the market. Accordingly, the analytics team is processing your product’s data to evaluate its growth metrics. At the same time, your business team is drilling down the sales data to scale revenue. Your stakeholders and managers are discussing your users’ retention and acquisition data. You may be inflowing data from multiple sources, but you needn’t create multiple sources to store your data. At the end of the day, you want all your decision-makers in sync with one another, processing the same data from a central source. This central source is also known as a single source of truth (SSOT). Find out all about SSOT from Siddhant Varma on Plutora’s blog. 

Observability vs. Monitoring: A Breakdown for Managers

Monitoring is the more traditional approach, where you retrieve metrics that you’ve decided you need. Often this is data that has been useful in the past: How much disk space is the database using? How many requests per second is the webserver handling? Monitoring focuses on a set of known failure modes. Running out of disk space is a very common failure mode, and monitoring lets you stay on top of it. However, computer systems can go wrong in new and exciting ways that your monitoring never foresaw. Monitoring might tell you something is wrong (requests are failing, for example). But in order to understand the reasons, you need an integrated view. This is what observability gives you. Get an in-depth comparison of both from Kathrin Paschen on Plutora’s blog. 

Monitis/TeamViewer Web Monitoring Alternatives: A Top Option to Consider

Owning a website doesn’t guarantee business success. In fact, a bad website can spell doom for your otherwise excellent concept. Besides a higher chance of being slow or down, a bad website won’t help visitors achieve what they came for, which is a frustrating user experience. This is where Pingdom and Monitis come into play—albeit with different degrees of effectiveness. When either are monitoring your website, you get insight into how it’s performing. Coming from different vendors, the two services approach and present this differently. Learn all about both from Taurai Mutimutema on DNS Stuff’s blog.

Centralized Logging for Docker – Configuration and Troubleshooting

Container logging adds some complexities we don’t experience when using VMs or dedicated hardware. With containers, once the container dies, the logs and data for the container also die. This may not be a problem for small applications with little logging. But for more complex applications or applications running in production, you need to start thinking about log persistence and management. For applications running in Docker containers, you need a way to easily access, search, and archive logs. Find out how best to do so from Sylvia Fronczak on Solarwinds’ blog.

Event Log Monitoring and Management: Best Practices

When you’re logging, you might come across different types of log data: database logs, network logs, API logs, front-end app logs, and security logs. However, not every developer uses logging the same way. Some developers are verbose and try to log every action in their code, and others log only a single action per component. But what’s best? This article takes a look at six best practices for event log monitoring, aggregation, and management. Learn all about the importance of setting standards across teams to improve your log data quality and the value of your log management tool from Michiel Mulders on Solarwinds’ blog. 

Monitoring Kafka – Key Metrics and Tools

Apache Kafka is a publish/subscribe messaging platform that helps us stream data into servers. To get a better grasp of this definition, let’s break it down a bit. Streaming is the process of publishing data from sources like web logs and sensor data into a cluster of servers. We can process this data as it’s coming into the cluster in real-time. Find out even more about Kafka from Alex Doukas on Solarwinds’ blog.

End-User Monitoring: Best Practices and Tools

Poor application performance, besides being a sign of potential problems, is a strong predictor of unhappy users—and unhappy users are likely to become former customers. So software organizations are always searching for ways to improve the performance of their applications. One of the most effective of such ways to improve performance is obtaining visibility of your app’s behavior—which is something that can be achieved through monitoring. This post is about a specific type of monitoring: end-user monitoring. Get all the details from Carlos Schults on Solarwinds’ blog. 

The Scalyr agent is typically able to handle incoming logs just fine with a default configuration, but if the log volume becomes too big, then the default configs may need adjusting to prevent the agent from being overwhelmed. In this article, we describe sets of configuration parameters of the Scalyr agent that you might want to use in your project to increase agent upload performance. Check it out in this post on Scalyr’s blog.

We also updated two posts recently. OpenCensus is an open-source project started by Google that can emit metrics and traces when it integrates within application code to give you a better understanding of what happens when the application is running. Learn more on Scalyr’s blog.

UI Test Automation: Definition, Guide, and Best Practices

Finally, we updated a post about UI test automation. “UI test automation” is a term that has become somewhat loaded over time. Different people might assign it very different meanings. To add to the confusion, there is (some) disagreement on whether UI testing is something worth pursuing at all. Learn all about it on Testim’s blog.