Posts related to software development, Unity Assets development, and Mobile Games creation, mostly using the C# and .Net technology stack.
In our previous post we discussed representing TV shows data as a graph using objects and their relations. In this post, we’ll see how to gather the information needed for our trivia game. There are a few websites that allow you to follow up on the show you watch, such as Rotten Tomatoes and TheTvDB. I’ve … Read more
Following my trivia games, I’ve decided to start working on a TV shows trivia. The first step of creating a trivia game, is to make sure I have enough data, and that I can represent it in a way that my engine can generate questions.Representing the data for TV shows as nodes in a graph … Read more
RavenDb provides a push notifications mechanism, named Changes API, that allows you to receive messages from a server about events that occurred there. This mechanism makes is extremely simple to create a ChangeMonitor class that can be used with CacheItemPolicy, in order to expire cache items when something happens on the server (such as a document being … Read more
Background Over the last several months, I’ve been playing around more and more with web development. Until now, I’ve spent most of that time reading blogs and tutorials. I’ve decided that now’s the time to start actually writing something. For one of my ideas, I wanted to allow users to create a tree diagram dynamically. … Read more
Marc Gravell is a valued associate in StackOverflow, so I make sure to follow his blog – thisguy knows what he’s doing (he’s the main contributor to Dapper.net, StackExchange.Redis and protobuf-net). Over the weekend, Marc wrote about a project called Cap’n Proto – a new serialization protocol, implemented by the same guy that developed Protobuf at … Read more
I am using Windows Azure Mobile Services to manage the Leaderboard of my Movies Trivia and Geo Trivia. Due to the nature of the data, I’m using 3 tables: Users: to maintain the users’ Id and Name Leaders: the list of players, ordered by their position in the board Results: the scores that are submitted … Read more
As I did my research on HyperLogLog, I used the built-in MD5 HashAlgorithm.As I was running my tests on larger and larger datasets, the running time grew too much to my liking. A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values. The values returned by … Read more
UPDATE: My implementation is no longer updated. I strong suggest you take a look at Microsoft’s CardinalityEstimator project, which implements the HyperLogLog algorithm, along with a few optimizations Over the last several months I’ve been immersing myself further and further into the big data world, and into developing and operating a SaaS. I’ve been trying … Read more
A while back, Netflix wrote in their blog about their graph library, and the work they’ve done to reduce the memory footprint of their graph. Reducing memory allows Netflix to maintain the whole graph relations in-memory (note that the node themselves are not maintained in-memory), which means that queries on the graph are returned extremely … Read more
I always prefer using existing libraries implemented by someone else – it means that I don’t have to study the subject matter, and not less important, that someone else maintains the code for me (tests the code, implements new features, follow-ups on newer versions of the APIs if any, etc.). That being said, every now and … Read more
I’ve been using KnockoutJS for a long time now, but only recently found the magic that is the Knockout-Mapping plugin. A few days ago, I spent some time refining some old code, and encountered something along the following lines: (The friendlyPastMoment() method is just a small wrapper method around MomentJS, for handling edge cases) We … Read more
If you are not familiar with LibraryThing, go ahead and visit their website – it’s probably the most comprehensive bookscollection in the web. LibraryThing provide several APIs, one of them a RESTful API, which can be invoked from C# relatively easily. In this post I’ll describe how to use that API. First, you need to … Read more