Alternatives to Xcode

I use TypeScript because it greatly simplify my refactoring efforts. I regularly re-validate my assumption about application architecture, and strictness of types allow me write make changes safely using just Visual Studio tooling. Integration with existing JavaScript libraries very simple and fast. If I have no time, I could just use any type as output of JS module. When I have more time, I could just submit PR to DefinitelyTyped and it would be quickly accepted. Overall it gives less ambiguity for my code.

.NET Core is #free, #cross-platform, and #opensource. A developer platform for building all types of apps ( #web apps #mobile #games #machinelearning #AI and #Desktop ).

Developers have chosen .NET for:

Productive: Combined with the extensive class libraries, common APIs, multi-language support, and the powerful tooling provided by the Visual Studio family ( Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code ), .NET is the most productive platform for developers.

Any app: From mobile applications running on iOS, Android and Windows, to Enterprise server applications running on Windows Server and Linux, or high-scale microservices running in the cloud, .NET provides a solution for you.

Performance: .NET is fast. Really fast! The popular TechEmpower benchmark compares web application frameworks with tasks like JSON serialization, database access, and server side template rendering - .NET performs faster than any other popular framework.

Hi Community! Trust everyone is keeping safe. I am exploring the idea of building a #Neobank (App) with end-to-end banking capabilities. In the process of exploring this space, I have come across multiple Apps (N26, Revolut, Monese, etc) and explored their stacks in detail. The confusion remains to be the Backend Tech to be used?

What would you go with considering all of the languages such as Node.js Java Rails Python are suggested by some person or the other. As a general trend, I have noticed the usage of Node with React on the front or Node with a combination of Kotlin and Swift. Please suggest what would be the right approach!

Excerpts from how we developed (and subsequently open sourced) Uber's cross-platform mobile architecture framework, RIBs , going from Objective-C to Swift in the process for iOS: https://github.com/uber/RIBs

Uber’s new application architecture (RIBs) extensively uses protocols to keep its various components decoupled and testable. We used this architecture for the first time in our new rider application and moved our primary language from Objective-C to Swift. Since Swift is a very static language, unit testing became problematic. Dynamic languages have good frameworks to build test mocks, stubs, or stand-ins by dynamically creating or modifying existing concrete classes.

Needless to say, we were not very excited about the additional complexity of manually writing and maintaining mock implementations for each of our thousands of protocols.

The information required to generate mock classes already exists in the Swift protocol. For Uber’s use case, we set out to create tooling that would let engineers automatically generate test mocks for any protocol they wanted by simply annotating them.

The iOS codebase for our rider application alone incorporates around 1,500 of these generated mocks. Without our code generation tool, all of these would have to be written and maintained by hand, which would have made testing much more time-intensive. Auto-generated mocks have contributed a lot to the unit test coverage that we have today.

We built these code generation tools ourselves for a number of reasons, including that there weren’t many open source tools available at the time we started our effort. Today, there are some great open source tools to generate resource accessors, like SwiftGen. And Sourcery can help you with generic code generation needs:

https://eng.uber.com/code-generation/ https://eng.uber.com/driver-app-ribs-architecture/

(GitHub : https://github.com/uber/RIBs )

As a Engineering Manager & Director at SmartZip, I had a mix of front-end, back-end, #mobile engineers reporting to me.

Sprints after sprints, I noticed some inefficiencies on the MobileDev side. People working multiple sprints in a row on their Xcode / Objective-C codebase while some others were working on Android Studio. After which, QA & Product ensured both applications were in sync, on a UI/UX standpoint, creating addional work, which also happened to be extremely costly.

Our resources being so limited, my role was to stop this bleeding and keep my team productive and their time, valuable.

After some analysis, discussions, proof of concepts... etc. We decided to move to a single codebase using React Native so our velocity would increase.

After some initial investment, our initial assumptions were confirmed and we indeed started to ship features a lot faster than ever before. Also, our engineers found a way to perform this upgrade incrementally, so the initial platform-specific codebase wouldn't have to entirely be rewritten at once but only gradually and at will.

Feedback around React Native was very positive. And I doubt - for the kind of application we had - no one would want to go back to two or more code bases. Our application was still as Native as it gets. And no feature or device capability was compromised.

In my modest opinion, Flutter is the future of mobile development. The framework is as important to mobile as React is to the web. And seeing that React Native does not finish taking off, I am focusing all my efforts on learning Flutter and Dart. The ecosystem is amazing. The community is crazy about Flutter. There are enough resources to learn and enjoy the framework, and the tools developed to work with it are amazing. Android Studio or Visual Studio Code has incredible plugins and Dart is a pretty straight forward and easy-to-learn language, even more, if you came from JavaScript. I admit it. I'm in love with Flutter. When you are not a designer, having a framework focused on design an pretty things is a must. And counting with tools like #flare for animations makes everything easier. It is so amazing that I wish I had a big mobile project right now at work just to use Flutter.

I liked Sublime Text for its speed, simplicity and keyboard shortcuts which synergize well when working on scripting languages like Ruby and JavaScript. I extended the editor with custom Python scripts that improved keyboard navigability such as autofocusing the sidebar when no files are open, or changing tab closing behavior.

But customization can only get you so far, and there were little things that I still had to use the mouse for, such as scrolling, repositioning lines on the screen, selecting the line number of a failing test stack trace from a separate plugin pane, etc. After 3 years of wearily moving my arm and hand to perform the same repetitive tasks, I decided to switch to Vim for 3 reasons:

• your fingers literally don’t ever need to leave the keyboard home row (I had to remap the escape key though)
• it is a reliable tool that has been around for more than 30 years and will still be around for the next 30 years
• I wanted to "look like a hacker" by doing everything inside my terminal and by becoming a better Unix citizen

The learning curve is very steep and it took me a year to master it, but investing time to be truly comfortable with my #TextEditor was more than worth it. To me, Vim comes close to being the perfect editor and I probably won’t need to switch ever again. It feels good to ignore new editors that come out every few years, like Atom and Visual Studio Code.

We use Visual Studio Code because it allows us to easily and quickly integrate with Git, much like Sublime Merge ,but it is integrated into the IDE. Another cool part about VS Code is the ability collaborate with each other with Visual Studio Live Share which allows our whole team to get more done together. It brings the convenience of the Google Suite to programming, offering something that works more smoothly than anything found on Atom or Sublime Text

UPDATE: Thanks for the great response. I am going to start with VSCode based on the open source and free version that will allow me to grow into other languages, but not cost me a license ..yet.

I have been working with software development for 12 years, but I am just beginning my journey to learn to code. I am starting with Python following the suggestion of some of my coworkers. They are split between Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA for IDEs that they use and PyCharm is new to me. Which IDE would you suggest for a beginner that will allow expansion to Java, JavaScript, and eventually AngularJS and possibly mobile applications?

Have been a Visual Studio Code user since just after launch to the general public, having used the likes of Eclipse and Atom previously. Was amazed how mature it seemed off the bat and was super intrigued by the bootstrapped nature of it having been written/based on Electron/TypeScript, and of course being an open-source app from Microsoft. The features, plugin ecosystem and release frequency are very impressive. I do dev work on both Mac and Windows and don't use anything else now as far as IDEs go.

UPDATE: Thanks for the great response. I am going to start with VSCode based on the open source and free version that will allow me to grow into other languages, but not cost me a license ..yet.

I have been working with software development for 12 years, but I am just beginning my journey to learn to code. I am starting with Python following the suggestion of some of my coworkers. They are split between Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA for IDEs that they use and PyCharm is new to me. Which IDE would you suggest for a beginner that will allow expansion to Java, JavaScript, and eventually AngularJS and possibly mobile applications?

I am a QA heading to a new company where they all generally use Visual Studio Code, my experience is with IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm. The language they use is JavaScript and so I will be writing my test framework in javaScript so the devs can more easily write tests without context switching.

My 2 questions: Does VS Code have Cucumber Plugins allowing me to write behave tests? And more importantly, does VS Code have the same refactoring tools that IntelliJ IDEA has? I love that I have easy access to a range of tools that allow me to refactor and simplify my code, making code writing really easy.