Zack Grossbart is an architect, designer, and author. He’s a Senior Technical Staff Member and Cloud Architect at IBM. Zack began loading DOS from a floppy disk when he was five years old and hasn’t stopped coding since. Zack lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with his partner and son.
OAuth2 is the protocol that enables anyone to log in with their Facebook account. It powers the “Log in with Facebook” button in apps and on websites everywhere. In this article, Zack Grossbart will show you how “Log in with Facebook” works and will explain the protocol behind it all. He’ll look at two examples: why Spotify uses Facebook to let you log into the Spotify mobile app, and why Quora uses Google and Facebook to let you log into its website.
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The “P” in P versus NP stands for polynomial time. That just means we can predict the maximum amount of time it will take to solve the problem. You may have never heard of P versus NP, but in this article, Zack Grossbart will walk you through it, show you how it works and explain why it matters. There’s a little math, but don’t worry; it’s all pretty easy. P versus NP is a mathematical question masquerading as a philosophical one. It describes the difference between solving a problem and knowing whether you’ve solved it.
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Static analyzers look at code and find problems before you run it. They do simple checks, like enforcing syntax, and more holistic checks, like making sure your functions aren’t too complex. Static analyzers also find errors that you can’t find with testing, like instances of == when you meant ===. In large projects and on big teams, you’ll be happy to have a little help finding those “simple” bugs that turn out to be a lot less simple than they looked.
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The debate between strongly and dynamically typed languages rages on. But understanding the issue starts with weak typing and languages such as C. The pendulum will swing back and forth many times in the coming years. The only solution is flexibility. Learn to work in each environment and you’ll work well with any team.
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In this article, Zack Grossbart walks you through the basics of animation. You’ll look at actions in Cocos2D and see how to combine them to create complex and custom effects. Also you will take a look at the Cocos2D library and how it supports programmatic animations in iPhone games.
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I love games and I’m a huge math nerd, so I made a new iPhone game based on a famous math problem called The Seven Bridges of Königsberg. I’m selling it in the App Store, but I also want to share it with everyone, so I made it open source.
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JavaScript has been called everything from great to awful to the assembly language of the Web, but we all use it. Love JavaScript or hate it: everyone admits there are serious flaws and not many other choices.
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You’ve presented the new website and everyone loves it. The design is crisp, the code is bug-free, and you’re ready to release. Then someone asks, “Does it work in Japanese?”
You break out in a cold sweat: you have no idea. The website works in English, and you figured other languages would come later. Now you have to rework the whole app to support other languages. Your release date slips, and you spend the next two months fixing bugs, only to find that you’ve missed half of them.
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Your website works. Now let’s make it work faster. Website performance is about two things: how fast the page loads, and how fast the code on it runs.
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E-commerce runs on secrets. Those secrets let you update your blog, shop at Amazon and share code on GitHub. Computer security is all about keeping your secrets known only to you and the people you choose to share them with.
We’ve been sharing secrets for centuries, but the Internet runs on a special kind of secret sharing called public-key cryptography. Most secret messages depend on a shared secret—a key or password that everyone agrees on ahead of time. Public-key cryptography shares secret messages without a shared secret key and makes technologies like SSL possible.
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When my WordPress plugin had only three users, it didn’t matter much if I broke it. By the time I reached 100,000 downloads, every new update made my palms sweat.
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Paper.js, Processing.js and Raphaël are the leading libraries for drawing on the Web right now. A couple of others are up and coming, and you can always use Flash, but these three work well with HTML5 and have the widest support among browser vendors.
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The Web is just starting to use animation well. For years, animated GIFs and Flash ruled. Text moved and flashed, but it was never seamless. Animations had boxes around them like YouTube videos. HTML5 canvas changes everything about Web animation.
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Google needs a way to let you serve AJAX content to browsers while serving simple HTML to crawlers. In other words, you need the same content in multiple formats. Find out more in this article.
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