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Many of us start our Docker journey pulling images from the Docker Hub with the time-honored docker pull command.

Like many of my age and generation, I started learning to program with BASIC. These were the days when you bought magazines full of pages and pages of code for games or basic applications. You spent hours with your friends painstakingly typing these programs into a computer to find there was a typo, or the game didn’t work, and then giving up. It was more about hanging out with your friends, whilst your parents felt like you were learning something.

Another year, another IO. Google made a slew of announcements, from their own foray into the assistant arena, to several curious devices and apps. Few of these have details or any API access for developers, so SitePoint will cover those at a later date. If you’re interested in reading more, I recommend Google’s official IO blog post.

Call me old-fashioned, but I have always preferred using a desktop app suited to each purpose. I feel that if all I'm going to use is a browser for everything I do, then why have a 'proper' computer? On a practical level, I travel frequently and am generally 'between' internet connectivity or using unstable internet connections, and 'real' applications are typically far better at allowing effective offline working.

Last weekend I was back in Tirana for my second OSCAL, an awesome little open source conference that has a massively diverse audience and punches well above it's weight. Whilst in Albania I was conducting some interviews and research for a forthcoming article on the Albanian (likely also including Kosovo) startup and tech scene(s), but more of that later. When I visited Albania last year it was my first trip to a Balkan country and since then I have visited Serbia (twice) and Croatia. Last year...

Like many of my age and generation, I started learning to program with BASIC. These were the days when you bought magazines full of pages and pages of code for games or basic applications. You spent hours with your friends painstakingly typing these programs in to a computer to find there was a typo, or the game didn't work, and then giving up. It was more about hanging out with your friends, whilst your parents felt like you were learning something.

Silicon Allee asked me if I would like to contribute some posts to their Medium publication and I thought what better to write than resurrect something I used to do back when I was living in Melbourne. I go to a lot of meetups. I enjoy meeting people, hearing what they're working on and being exposed to new ideas. Writing something about every talk I see each week would take a long time, so instead I will just tell you who I saw, what they spoke about and what you can do to find out more.

Chris Ward looks at the Swift Package Manager, an early-days dependency management utility for Swift.

Crate.io focuses on database simplicity and horizontal scalability. We aim to make scaling your data from millions to billions of records and beyond as simple as possible. We have clients who write and query gigabytes of data a minute, store terabytes a day and love the performance and stability that Crate offers. But the question always remained at the back of our minds - when taken to the extreme, what is Crate really capable of? (Co-authored with Christian Haudum and Ruslan Kovalov)

Note that this post has been updated as of October 20, 2016.

A modern and flexible alternative to databases Have you ever been dissatisfied with SQL databases, or felt that the standard tables, rows, and columns of relational databases did not quite fit your application? NoSQL is a modern alternative that offers a flexible, dynamic style of data storage. This tutorial will provide you with a good overview of NoSQL and the benefits that it provides to users.

I was on holiday last week, so of course have been busy. People staying, two parties in our house, tourist stuff, and some work. My Wife has also been in Hospital the past two weeks and then left straight for a trip to the US, compounding how much I had on my plate.

There's no denying that whilst Bitcoin's future may be hazy right now, the underlying technology it relies upon -- the Blockchain -- has revolutionized many industries and projects, with more to come. Ascribe is a fascinating startup that uses Bitcoin's Blockchain to record a limited quantity of unique references to digital artworks. Thus making them traceable, accountable and (hopefully) more valuable, due to this finite amount of 'copies'.

I'm excited about Swift for reasons I will expand upon later, but it's mostly the enthusiasm it has attracted. In less than six months, here are the project's GitHub stats. I know GitHub stats aren't always indicative of anything, but still, these numbers are impressive. Last week I presented a talk at the fantastic MDevCon in Amsterdam on the past, present and future of Swift. Despite some technical issues, it was well received and seemed like a good topic to turn into an article, so here it...

Attend any tech-related event or read any tech-related article over the past 18 months, and you will likely have heard of Docker and have an inkling of what it is and does.

OK, I'm late again, but this time I have a decent excuse. My Wife has been in Hospital the past week and it has thrown my planning and timing. By pure coincidence, it leads me nicely to the topic I wanted to discuss this installment based on a presentation I have given twice. The topic is physical and mental health for developers.

Images enhance any interface and can help engagement and interaction with your users. In this video we will look at how to load and display images from a remote location via an API and the Volley library. We will look at two methods for loading images and how to layout and format images in an interface.

[Chip Shop](https://chipshopgame.com) has been a labour of love for me over the past two years. It has been through many changes and revisions and isn't yet 100%, but I have always needed to get something live before it becomes a never ending process of 'polishing'. After several play test sessions, I consider the game 'ready enough' to put up for sale and available to the public. It's not complete, there are still a couple of issues with the game that I want to iron out, but I feel that 'releasing' will help me get more...

I go to a lot of events. Firstly because I get bored easily, but mainly because I like hearing what people are working on and their ideas. I have noticed an increasing amount of companies and events that label themselves as 'tech', and I challenge if they actually are. To me it feels like some older phrases that are slowly dying and losing their meaning.

Not since the shuttering of Google Reader has there been quite so many outcries of surprise and annoyance amongst tech fans. Facebook's announcement that their popular developer service platform, Parse, will shut in a years time caused ripples of panic amongst developers who rely on it. It's always been a bad idea to be too reliant on a centralized, commercial service as it may not always last for ever. Parse wont be the first or the last to close and it's a good lesson to us all to be flexible...

I make no pretense that I am a generalist and get bored quickly. I have written before about how this sometimes makes you feel left out, or worse, an idiot who has wasted their life. I want to explore this topic in more detail, and that of 'tech tribes', that I feel it relates to.

Your app is ready, the next steps are to get it into the Google Play Store for people to download and use. In this video we look at preparing your application for release and creating a listings page for your creation.

I apologise for the delay in this installment of the Weekly Squeak, I let various things get the better of me in the past weeks and am annoyed that I did. First the madness of a series of events, conferences and travel and then I got hit by a crippling cold-flu thing that has made me struggle to get even the work I needed to get done complete, let alone the things I wanted to do. I had a topic I wanted to cover in this post, but I think I will save it for the future and instead talk about some...

In this video you'll be building upon previously learned techniques by taking data imported via API and displaying it to the interface. We'll learn how to get into the API data, get it into a usable format, and then once it is properly formatted, attach that data to the interface to make a usable implementation of the API data that, in this example, you are fetching from the Marvel API.

Meet Mathias Fußenegger, aka 'Jordi', one of Crate's core engineers and a massive Linux fan. At Snow Sprint, amongst other things, Jordi decided to add a random data generator to his Crate dev tools project.

Meet Christian Haudum, aka 'Haudi', one of Crate's integration engineers and a fan of vinyl and dub step. At Snow Sprint, amongst other things, Haudi decided to create a process monitoring tool for Crate.

After making many changes, some of which I will get around to blogging about soon, play testing for Chip Shop is open again! If you're not already signed up to the testing newsletter, [then join here](https://gregariousmammal.us10.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=a177a7811dd28fcd87829f78f&id=13bd96907c), but this isn't compulsory, it will just keep you up to date. ## Manual You can access the game manual as [HTML](https://chipshopgame.com/manual/) and [PDF](https://chipshopgame.com/pod/Individual%20pdfs/manual/manual.pdf). ## Print Yourself You can download PDFs of all the game assets to print yourself, cut out and play. If you open [this URL](https://chipshopgame.com/pod/), you should find everything you need, split into respec...

Classy is an intriguing project hoping to bridge some gaps between designers more used to web or front end projects and app developers. Classy allows for the use of 'CSS-esque' stylesheets to style native iOS app interface components.

I don't have an particular themes from the week I can remember in enough detail to discuss this week, so thought it time I dragged out one of my long term 'topics to discuss'. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for The Fetch on Meetup Etiquette and after experiences from the past six months in Berlin it seemed time to revisit, update and revise this post. Many of the points in the original post still apply, I'm supplementing them here.

As a coder of many years, I am a keen believer in writing everything once and being able to use it in multiple places. In the coding world, thanks to open data formats and widely supported APIs we can generally have one central set of content and use it for different applications and use cases, all nicely in sync. In the desktop design world, this has traditionally been harder, with sources of content in Word documents, InDesign files and maybe some content management systems or spreadsheets....