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When a Kotlin non-null property turns up null, you know something has gone subtly, yet terribly, wrong. You trusted that type system, and it let you down. But how? How does the impossible happen? We’ll get to the bottom of this!

While basic slices have their place, you will often want to provide uers with additional information or controls. Toggle actions make your Slices more interactive by providing a way for users to enable or disable certain controls in your application.

Let’s get right to it. You need to test your code, and you need to test it often. You do a lot of manual testing throughout the development process, find bugs, and fix them. While this can be very beneficial, it leaves much of the code untested. When I say untested, I mean untested by you. The code will be tested at some point, it just might be by one of your users. This is where writing automated unit tests comes in, however, it is often the last thing developers do, if at all. Where do you start? How do you make this class testable? Many of these challenges can be overcome by using protocols to mock our objects in testing.

Search is a hard problem, thankfully a lot of really smart people have spent a lot of time on it and come up with some awesome tools. Most of our projects involve some kind of search functionality, and often tuning search indexes on the database server will get us enough performance to launch the minimum viable product. But say we have 350,000 things that need fulltext search with ordering and boosting, or 50,000 things with extremely complex access controls in a high traffic environment that needs to search quickly and scale up to 10s of millions of things? Here’s a low-level look at some of the specific steps we’ve taken to make Rails scale. Can rails scale?. We disagree. Onward!

I’m a fan of Caveman Debugging, where you use print statements to trace program flow and display specific program information. I was kind of surprised when reading Coders at Work how many industry luminaries do the same thing. It’s just another tool in the debugging arsenal, along with unit tests, debuggers, Instruments, and the plethora of other software investigation toys.

While basic slices have their place, you will often want to provide uers with additional information or controls. One way to make a Slice more interactive is to provide multiple actions. These show up as tappable icons that will take the user to different screens in your app, or take the user to the same screen with different sets of data.

The last post about isEqual: vs isEqualToString: included some timings I made to test the performance of those two calls, along with compare:. That posting mentioned going down a rabbit hole, verifying commonly held beliefs of about isEqualToString:. The other rabbit hole I went down related to the performance tuning. A couple of commenters on the post asked some good questions relating to the timings, especially about literal strings.

We run a CI Kernel on a single pixel at a time and be returning a modified pixel. For the syntax, the Core Image Kernel Language essentially sits on top of the OpenGL Shading Language so it’ll have a bit different rules to what we would see from Swift of Objective-C