Blog - Christos Sotiriou | Software Architect

Blog

A collection of 45 posts

Goodbye iOS... Hello Web development

Goodbye iOS... Hello Web development

The last year has been one hell of a year for me. After eight years of full-time iOS development and 11 years of developing for Apple devices, I decided to move on to something new that I have wanted for longer than I was willing to admit. A quick recap

Working for personal projects without burning out

Working for personal projects without burning out

There are some among us who just can’t sit tight, and feel the urge to create something on their own. Most of the time this ‘something’ will end up never seeing the light of day. It has happened to me, I assume that this is the case for everyone

DevLog: How I created my first AR NodeJS-backed web service

DevLog: How I created my first AR NodeJS-backed web service

A few years ago, a client of mine had an idea about an application that would leverage augmented reality features to play videos on top of images that would be featured into pages of his Greek news magazine. Back then, NodeJS was in the mid 10.x (around 2014). There

On software dogmas

On software dogmas

I love coding. I don’t care about the language I use, or the technology. I care about solving difficult problems, about creating something from nothing. I grew up believing that software is philosophy, knowledge, way of thinking. I still do. However, I have to admit that based on the

React Native Navigation

React Native Navigation

I have been trying to find a good navigation library for a project I have undertaken, and I have been looking into numerous frameworks the last few days. Although I have been able to find some decent frameworks, I haven’t still found the best library for navigating i inside

A Showcase of Ambient Intelligence appliances

software engineering

A Showcase of Ambient Intelligence appliances

It’s been a while since my last blog post. Those were some very busy months. One of the highlight of those months, was work done for Atcom NEXT, a yearly event where we get to show the future of technology put some of our ideas into practice, and create

REST Client in Swift with Promises

REST Client in Swift with Promises

Diving deeper into Swift, I am examining different ways of improving my architecture, and making the best decisions when creating new applications. For me, architecture and expressiveness in the code is much more important that a complicated algorithm that boosts performance over 100%. One thing I am called to do

R.I.P. iGreekNews part 2

In an unexpected turn of events, I was forced to take down iGreekNews. In short, Apple didn’t like that iGreekNews consults RSS feeds from various sources. I find it strange, considering that the purpose of RSS is to be free, and it is a means of communicating with news

* Release * iGreekNews 2.0 for iOS

One year after I took down iGreekNews [https://oramind.com/igreeknews-ime-dead/] (along with iMe), I decided to re-implement iGreekNews using a new approach. It was time to put my NodeJS skills to good use, and construct an API around news feeds, and RSS, and also re-write the iOS application from

A few thoughts on Parallelism

A few thoughts on Parallelism

It’s been a while. I am very sure many people experienced connectivity issues to my server. I believe these issues have been resolved. While searching in my old archives, I stumbled across an essay that I had written as a small part of a bigger exam in the university

Working on Big Data...

Doing a project on Big Data. It’s the first time that I realize that data visualization is not a gimmick but actually helps one to process data with naked eye just with a glimpse. This screenshot is taken using MATLAB. X axis shows the index of a venue that

Monsters in our dreams

Monsters in our dreams

Every dream has a monster, visible or not. I’m talking about “daydreaming”, imagining one’s self in another situation, in a happy place, position, circumstance… Every such dream starts with having lots of imagination, and sometimes, false and stupid hopes. But it’s a dream, right? Everyone has the

Studies...

I always wanted to study abroad. When I started my Bachelor’s degree, I said that my MSc would be abroad. Never knew why I said that, I didn’t even know if I would attend a Master’s course. I never thought about it again, until I graduated obtaining

Idea Crisis (Reposting)

Idea Crisis (Reposting)

A while ago in my old blog I had posted in Greek an article, that had many views. Lately, I have been requested to re-post the article. The article is about the upcoming economic crisis, and it dates back in 2010-11-07. It’s in greek, and the original title is

JSONkit and Exception handling

Having troubles with JSONKit and nil and null exceptions in occasions you can’t understand? This thing happened to me when trying to use something like “self.textview.text = [dictionary valueForKey:@”someKey”];” and I couldn’t understand why I kept receiving extensions about mismatch of the classes and NULL. Well,

Thoughts on Programing Paradigms

It’s been a while since I have posted here. That doesn’t mean I am inactive. iGreekNews needed an update, and my full day job is also taking me too much time. I have no regrets, however. This amount of work comes with a great amount of knowledge. The

Xcode and iOS 5: Bringing back backtrace symbols

software engineering

Xcode and iOS 5: Bringing back backtrace symbols

If you have downloaded iOS 5, you will have aundoubtedly noticed that there is something important missing about the new SDK: the stack trace printed from each exception. You now see hexadecimal representations of symbols where you previewsly saw full human-readable symbols. Apple is undergoing changes in the low-level foundation

Small Update

Well, it’s a sad day today. Remember about project Unicorn? It was a project I started a few months ago before I joined the army. I stumbled upon a problem no one could help me, so I abandoned the project, and I recreated it a few months ago, finishing

taxiplon a Global Mobile Awards Finalist

taxiplon a Global Mobile Awards Finalist

I am happy to announce that a project I am taking part to, taxiplon is now a Global Mobile Awards 2012 nominee in the category of Best Mobile Innovation for Automotive, Transport or Utilities.You can read all about the competition here [http://www.globalmobileawards.com/awards2012/nominees.php]: In

GCD, NSOperation and Core Data/ Files on disk

Core data is fast, even on iOS, where handheld devices lack in speed when compared to desktop computers. However, there will be times where you will be required to do some heavy reading, wether that will be plain files from disk or information stored in Core Data. In my case,

Dark Days

Well, the title says it all. A year ago, I had written an article, called “Η κρίση των ιδεών”, written in Greek. It translates to english as “The Crisis of idea(l)s”. Ι had epxressed my concerns about what the oncoming economic crisis in Greece, stating that the crisis

Hello World!

Welcome in the new blog component, which will reside in the main site from now on. Perhaps this will save time and confusion to users that were sometime lost when navigating through the site and its different sections. Let me tell you about something I encountered when reading about my

RL problems revisited…

I wish that a day had 25 hours. 24 hours just doesn’t seem enough. Lately, I am striving with Cocoa’s underlying infrastructure concerning tasks in the Terminal. Seems there is a lot of potential to programs running terminal in the background. My latest application is nearly complete but…

Thoughts on Singletons

There are sometimes where some things keep bugging me in terms of programming. I often keep asking myself and others about utilizing the best techniques to solve various programming problems and applying certain concepts in a program. Most answers I keep reading/hearing tend towards the “wow” factor. Which is

Project Unicorn

Do you know what a unicorn is? It is a mythical creature, impossible to catch. Each developer has his/her own unicorn, which means that there is a project they just can’t seem to finish due to several reasons. I have such a project. Some time before I join