Yearly Archives: 2014

Programming

MyoSharp – Update On The Horizon

MyoSharp If you haven't checked it out already, my friend Tayfun and I created an open source C# wrapper for Thalmic's Myo. It's hosted on GitHub over here, so you can browse and pull down code whenever you want. We've had some great feedback from users of our API, so we continue to welcome it (both positive and negative!) in order to improve the usability. Thalmic has plans to release a firmware update to allow more data to be accessible through their API. Right now, MyoSharp is a bit out of date, but once this big firmware update lands we'll take some more time to get it up to date again. Remember, it's open source so you can feel free to contribute! Troubleshooting The most common question I receive is "I keep getting an exception about not being able to connect…

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December 7, 2014
Game Development / Personal Project Updates

ProjectXyz: Enforcing Interfaces (Part 2)

Enforcing Interfaces This is my second installment of the series related to my small side project that I started. I mentioned in the first post that one of the things I wanted to try out with this project is coding by interfaces. There's an article over at CodeProject that I once read (I'm struggling to dig it up now, arrrrrghh) that really gave me a different perspective about using interfaces when I program. Ever since then I've been a changed man. Seriously. The main message behind the article was along the lines of: Have your classes implement your interface, and to be certain nobody is going to come by and muck around with your class's API, make sure they can't knowingly make an instance of the class. One of the easiest ways to do this (and bear with me here, I'm…

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November 12, 2014
Game Development / Personal Project Updates

ProjectXyz: Why I Started a Side Project (Part 1)

ProjectXyz Alright, I'll admit it... Even for a placeholder name on a side project it's pretty terrible, right? Well, my apologies. So, if you made it to this post you might be wondering what ProjectXyz is and why I started it up. From a high level, I started working on ProjectXyz so that I could have a hobby programming project to tinker with and I figured I'd blog about my adventures in bringing it all together. I plan on making this a mini-series documenting some of the things I'm learning or experimenting with, so this will serve as the intro to the series. Before we get too far, here's the link to the GitHub site: https://github.com/ncosentino/ProjectXyz Why Have a Side Project? Here's the main thing I want to talk about in part 1 of this series: Why should you have a…

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November 9, 2014
C# / .NET / dotnet / CodeProject / Programming / Tutorial

Controlling a Myo Armband with C#

Background Thalmic Labs has started shipping their Myo armband that allows the wearer's arm movements and gestures to control different pieces of integrated technology. How cool is that? My friend and I decided we wanted to give one a whirl and see what we could come up with. We're both C# advocates, so we were a bit taken back when we saw the only C# support in the SDK was made for Unity. We decided to take things into our own hands and open source a Myo C# library. We're excited to introduce the first version of MyoSharp! The underlying Myo components are written in C++, and there's only several functions that are exposed from the library that we can access. In order to do this, we need to leverage platform invocation (PInvokes) from C# to tap into this functionality. Once you…

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October 6, 2014
Leadership & Management / Programming / Startups & Small Business

Hack The North

Hack The North... What The Hack Is That? Hack The North is Canada's largest international hackathon. It's big. It's bad. It's awesome. Okay, but what does that even mean? The idea is that 1000 people get together from all over the world in an event where they're given 36 hours to create amazing technology hacks. There's a lack of sleep but no lack of amazing ideas and hacked together proof of concepts that show incredible innovation. Sponsors are present to hand out prizes for best usage of their product or API to competitors as well as mentor them and provide help with problem solving. This year, Hack The North was hosted at The University of Waterloo. Bro, Do You Even Hack?! This was my first time ever at a hackathon. I've participated in the Ontario Engineering Competition (OEC) which is much…

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September 21, 2014
Leadership & Management

Continuous Improvement – One on One Tweaks (Pt. 2)

Continuing With Continuous Improvement I wrote about continuous improvement before and how I've been trying to tie that into my leadership role through changes to my one on one process. To recap, at our organization we try to roll continuous improvement into most things that we do. We're well aware that we're not going to get things perfect the first time, so as long as we have a process in place to learn, reflect, and adapt, then we can make changes to better our situation. It's something that's ongoing and it doesn't really have an end. So long as your organization is growing and changing over time, or the environment in which your organization is changing over time, having continuous improvement baked into your culture is key to success. Previously, I mentioned that at Magnet Forensics I hold regular one…

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August 18, 2014
Android

Hack Your TODO List With Google Keep

Trying To Keep It Alllll Together... I'm a big fan of TODO lists. I find that they're a great way for me to set up a bunch of tasks and feel really productive as I work through them. I'll make TODO lists for almost anything. What do I need to get done tomorrow morning at work? What groceries do I need to get? What topics am I thinking of blogging about? I'll get some sort of TODO list going for anything. The one thing that I need in my TODO list to stay effective is to constantly have it around me to remind me. I was running the Evernote app on my Android phone and recently made the observation that things that I put in there had a much higher likelihood of getting done versus things I put in my…

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July 19, 2014
C# / .NET / dotnet / Programming

Refactoring For Interfaces: An Adventure From The Trenches

Refactoring: Some Background If you're a seasoned programmer you know all about refactoring. If you're relatively new to programming, you probably have heard of refactoring but don't have that much experience actually doing it. After all, it's easier to just rewrite things from scratch instead of trying to make a huge design change part way through, right? In any mature software project, it's often the case where you'll get to a point where your code base in its current state cannot properly sustain large changes going forward. It's not really anyone's fault--it's totally natural. It's impossible to plan absolutely everything that comes up, so it's probable that at some point at least part of your software project will face refactoring. In my real life example, I was tasked with refactoring a software project that has a single owner. I'm close…

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July 15, 2014
Articles / Leadership & Management

Leadership: What Does It Mean? – Weekly Article Dump

Leadership Everyone has their own variation of what leadership means. For me, leadership means empowering others to accomplish their goals and providing assistance when they need it. There were a few articles that came up on LinkedIn this week that I wanted to share with everyone and discuss how they fit into my perspective on leadership. Articles Does Your Team Work With You Or For You?: Kwame Manu-Antwi opens up the article in an interesting fashion. When I read the title of the article, I figured this was going to be the typical leadership vs management debate. However, Kwame goes into describing a scenario where he had a humbling experience from one of his team that made some sacrifices for him. This was truly an example of working for him. The entire second half of the article shares a bunch of…

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June 21, 2014

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