Recently I have been working on an open source .NET library idea for Windows Azure. Check blobmetadb out on GitHub. blobmetadb watches your application’s requests to Azure Blob Storage (S3 of Microsoft, in case you’re not familiar) and keeps record of blobs you upload. By keeping a local database (Redis) of metadata of blobs, you can enumerate them, compute sizes of clusters very quickly. An example use case is, assume you have a Dropbox-like application in which you use Azure Blob Storage to store files uploaded by your users. Read More →

For a while, I had this idea of redesigning Microsoft employee badges for a modern and neat look. So I spared a few hours this weekend. It’s over a year Microsoft has started to rebrand itself, starting from its logo to a brand new looking OS, from campus shuttles to direction signs on the campus and so on. Many employees are wearing this badge on their belts or pockets every day. Read More →

A few days ago I announced a new open source library that provides querying methods for Go collections. By far, it’s my most popular project on GitHub, with around 300 stars. Before talking about it more, go ahead and take a look to get a rough idea. First of all, Go’s type system sucks, everybody knows that and it is by design. At least, Go language creators are fine with it, apparently it gets their work done in Google infrastructure level. Read More →

(This is a mind dump that I’d normally send to /dev/null, nothing logical and relevant here.) Today was my 24th birthday and it’s been a little over a year I moved to USA. Many things happened in 2013. I lost some weight, got new hobbies, met new people, had fun moments with them, started living more healthily. I am now living alone, moved from Bellevue to Seattle, WA. I now live in hipster capitol of the Northwest, Capitol Hill neighborhood. Read More →

My recent involvement with my new side project, go-linq, showed me that type system of Go is not designed for anything near object-oriented programming. There are no generics, no type inheritance, or anything helpful for certain purposes. However there is a type called interface{} you can assign pretty much anything into it, like object in .NET or Object in Java: var o interface{} o := 3.14 o := Student{Name:"Ahmet"} and it does not give any compilation errors. Read More →

Last weekend, I finished an iOS app that checks if latest Apple products are available for pickup in nearby Apple retail stores called In-Stock. It got rejected from App Store and no way it is getting in. So I’m open sourcing it. It looks like this: This app makes it dead simple to check availability of a new iPhone in town. It gets the job done in 2 seconds, compared to at least a few minutes you would spend on store. Read More →

Objective-C is a big pain in the ass when it comes to serialize instances of your custom classes inheriting from NSObject. If you Google how to you serialize your custom objects into JSON, you will get tens of results saying “implement NSCoding” protocol. Biggest take of this post will be: You don’t need to implement NSCoding. Here’s why: First of all, take a look at Sam’s article on how to implement NSCoding protocol. Read More →

I recently discovered rakyll’s new Go library magicmime on GitHub. In simple words, this library provides MIME type detection for files or buffers in Go. For example, if you have a file uploaded to your application, you might want to figure out its MIME type (e.g. if it is an image or a video file). This project is a demo of how to do C bindings in Go: It uses libmagic(3) to make calls directly to this native library. Read More →