Engineering (2)

The Ultimate Guide to Open Source

Introduction In the modern software world, open-source projects have gained immense value, helping conserve significant resources in software development. Open-source solutions have played pivotal roles in the success of startups, aiding them in various aspects, from optimizing development resources for timely project launches to occasionally contributing to business strategies. As more companies integrate open-source software
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11 min read

Integrating with Logging Platforms on iOS

You might ask yourself, are users reaching certain screens? What crashes happen in production? Are certain things happening as expected? This is the area of production logging. Logging during development is straightforward. You just print things to the console. But in production, you do not have this luxury. Instead, you have to roll your logging
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4 min read

Setting Background Modes and Device Capability Privacies in iOS Apps

What are the required background modes and protected resource privacies on iOS? Discover and learn to set them appropriately in this article. It focuses on configuring background modes for iOS apps in Xcode and requesting authorization to access the user’s camera, microphone, and media. Resources This article uses the following projects to demonstrate how background
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11 min read

Real-World Xcode Project Using Tuist

There's a file in there with the extension proj. This file is what it is about, this file is probably the source of most of the source-level conflicts you will be facing when working on a single Xcode project with multiple people. How often do you intend to quickly merge your work, only to be
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12 min read

Linting Documentation with Vale to Increase Quality & Consistency

Most software developers are familiar with tools to lint their source code. Linting code is the process of checking your code against a defined set of rules to help keep a consistent naming convention, prevent common mistakes, and anti-patterns in other aspects of your code, provided the requirement can be expressed in configuration understood by
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8 min read

SwiftUI Animation: How To Add Facebook Live Reactions to Livestream Chats

An app like Telegram uses fine-grained animations to engage, entertain, and onboard users in many ways. In this article, you will learn how to build and integrate great SwiftUI animations and motion for your iOS apps to provide wow user experiences. You can use the animations in this article in, for example, live video streaming
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11 min read

How to Achieve a 9ms Inference Time for Transformer Models

Interested in Moderation for your product? Check out Stream's Auto-Moderation Platform! It is crucial for the technology platforms to moderate any harmful content as early as possible. Most modern moderation tools take a few hundred milliseconds to a few seconds to detect harmful content. Often the action against detected harm is taken after the harm
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5 min read

Minimal Node Integration to Get You Started with Stream

Let's set you up with a minimal integration service written in NodeJS. Note, this implementation should only be used for testing purposes and is intended to get you started. What this sample offers is a very basic login and sign-up endpoint that interacts with the Stream Chat and Feeds API to supply you with user
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3 min read

7 Android Resources To Level Up As a Developer

The development ecosystem is changing so fast. Every day, new tech stacks and solutions are introduced to the community, and some materials are beneficial and reduce many development resources. To be a better developer, you need to not only make an effort to write good code but also keep learning helpful knowledge from excellent resources.
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5 min read

WebRTC IP Leaks: Should You Still Be Worried?

Before getting to the juicy part of this article, you need to understand why WebRTC requires your IP address and how this is not technically a vulnerability as much as a feature of WebRTC. We’ll explore: Attack vectors that demonstrate how WebRTC can be exploited The privacy implications of a leaked IP address How to
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9 min read

Using SwiftUI Effects Library: How to Add Particle Effects to iOS Apps

Creating particle animations similar to the iMessage screen and bubble effects in iOS can be difficult. The main reason is that the Core Animation Emitter Layer that allows you to animate, emit and render particle effects is complex to set up and configure due to its large number of parameters. In this article, you will
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10 min read

Becoming A Successful Open-Source Librarian

The open-source software ecosystem is in a constant state of growth. Every day, new libraries and solutions are introduced on GitHub that are designed to accelerate development speed and make our lives as developers easier. Nowadays most companies, especially startups, are highly dependent on open-source libraries. They reduce development resources needed and have been a
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17 min read

How to Integrate Live Audio and Video Into iOS Apps Using WebRTC

The main reason is that there are several factors that one needs to consider for the backbone or underlying technology. One way to embed live media into iOS applications is to use Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC). In this article, you will discover how WebRTC works and how you can integrate it into your next iOS
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9 min read

Building A Conferencing App With WebRTC: P2P, SFU, or MCU

When dealing with relatively simple real-time data, WebSockets and gRPC have become the go-to mechanisms for most developers. These are relatively simple to work with, and the existing documentation makes building larger applications mostly trivial. When dealing with the WebRTC protocol, however, things are more complicated and nuanced - especially with video and audio. Video
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6 min read

HTTP, WebSocket, gRPC or WebRTC: Which Communication Protocol is Best For Your App?

Our forms of communication are constantly improving: getting faster, more convenient, and more reliable. Our communication has evolved from sending messages using carrier pigeons, to postal mail, to the invention of the landline, to email and text messages from a small device that fits in our pockets. In the future, we may even transition meetings
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33 min read

Design Patterns and Architecture: The Android Developer Roadmap - Part 4

We’ve broken down our 2022 Android developer roadmap into a multi-part series, each covering important Android fundamentals and the current ecosystem. In the last post, we discussed essential elements of modern Android development, including Fragments, App Navigation, Architecture Components, and Android Jetpack libraries. In part four, you’ll learn the following six sections of our Android
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17 min read

SFU, MCU, or P2P: What's the Difference Between These WebRTC Architectures?

SFUs are commonly used in VoIP and video conferencing applications. SFUs differ from Peer-to-Peer (P2P) connections, in which each party sends and receives media directly to and from the other party. They are also different from Multipoint Control Units (MCUs), which receive media from all parties and then broadcast it to all other parties. SFUs
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4 min read

6 Jetpack Compose Guidelines to Optimize Your App Performance

Since Google announced Jetpack Compose stable 1.0, many companies are getting started to adopt Jetpack Compose into their projects. According to Google’s What developers are saying, Jetpack Compose increases their productivity and code quality. Jetpack Compose has a dedicated optimization system but it's essential to understand the rendering mechanism of Jetpack Compose for improving your
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11 min read

Stream Loves Open Source: Aug 2022

At Stream, we rely on open source to build our products and SDKs. In this article, we want to take the time to highlight some of our favorite projects and maintainers ❤️. The key takeaway of this article is to support open source projects you rely on in any way you can. We can all
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6 min read

Using Xcode: Creating Reusable and Shareable Color Palettes

Having a full range of colors that can be shared and reused in different Xcode projects improves efficiency and workflow because it removes the time wasted in looking for colors that will work together for your projects. Additionally, it ensures consistency of color usage within your apps and projects. Historically, developers and designers create color
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7 min read

Definitive Flutter Painting Guide

“Everything is a widget.” Well, yes - but what is a widget? Widgets used in making Flutter apps can themselves be composed of smaller widgets. Most widgets carry some kind of visual component - either defined by themselves or represented by smaller widgets. Unlike native frameworks, Flutter underneath does not use OS views. Instead, Flutter
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29 min read

Exploring Google’s Now in Android Open-Source Project

In 2022 Google I/O, Google’s DevRel team released an open-source project, Now in Android, built with the modern Android architecture and Jetpack libraries. In this article, you will cover the overall architecture, each layer, and tech stacks that are used in Now in Android project, such as Material3, Jetpack Compose, and app performance. Before you
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9 min read

Transformations in Machine Learning

On 8th September 2020, an article in the Guardian was written by a robot called GPT-3. They asked the robot to write an article about why humans should not be scared of robots and Artificial Intelligence. The human editors wrote the introduction for the article and instructed GPT-3 to generate the next possible sentences iteratively.
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17 min read

Seeding a Core Data Store With Remote JSON Data

There are various situations where you’ll find yourself needing to import a sizable amount of JSON to seed a Core Data store. Sometimes you can ship this data alongside your app in the form of a pre-populated SQLite store. Other times, the data that you need to retrieve is so dynamic that shipping the data
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18 min read

WWDC State of the Union, What Can We Look Forward To?

Yesterday we wrote about the Apple WWDC Keynote on our blog. On the same day of the WWDC keynote, Apple also live-streamed the Apple WWDC Platform State of the Union. Apple focussed software developers often call this “the Developer Keynote”. The State of the Union session is a more technical presentation with much more detail
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12 min read

Apple WWDC Keynote Impressions

Like many things, software development happens in cycles. Apple as a company is like this as well. Each year Apple releases new hardware and new major versions of their hardware and software. To give software developers working in the Apple ecosystem a chance to adopt new hardware and software versions, Apple organizes a yearly conference
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13 min read

Server-Side Vapor Swift Implementation With Google, Apple, and Github Authentication

In this post, you'll learn how to build a server application with the Vapor framework to provide tokens to an iOS app to use with the Stream Chat SDK. You'll learn how to leverage different types of authentication for users and provide them with tokens. Note: for this tutorial, you'll need Xcode 12.3 installed, Homebrew,
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15 min read

App Navigation and Jetpack: The Android Developer Roadmap - Part 3

We’ve broken down our 2022 Android developer roadmap into a multi-part series. Each section dives deep into important Android fundamentals and the current Android ecosystem. In the last post, we discussed important elements of Android’s primary components, including Intents and App Entry Points. In part three, we’ll cover the next four sections of our Android
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11 min read

Building Your First Application With Deno

Deno is a recently launched runtime environment for JavaScript and TypeScript used for building modern server-side applications. In this article, you will learn how to build a backend server with Deno. I will show you how to create a live server, create API routes, store environment variables, read and write files in file systems, and
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12 min read

Modeling Retrofit Responses With Sealed Classes and Coroutines

As the rate of data communication increases, the complexity of the application architecture also increases. How an application handles API responses will determine its overall architectural design and code complexity. In this post, you will cover how to model Retrofit responses with Coroutines and Sealed classes to reduce code complexity and make your application architecture
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7 min read

Scaling Your Xcode Projects With Tuist

One of the biggest challenges for iOS development teams is scaling a codebase when their company or product takes off. Growth and scaling issues are a great thing, but they introduce some typical growing pains as well, like: Clearly defining responsibilities when splitting up your development effort across multiple teams. Decreasing the edit-build-run cycle of
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6 min read

Reducing App and SDK Size With Emerge Tools

The Importance of Mobile App and SDK Size When developing a mobile app, one crucial performance metric is app size. An app’s size can be difficult to accurately measure with multiple variants and device spreads. Once measured, it’s even more difficult to understand and identify what’s contributing to size bloat. Many people think that as
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5 min read

App Components: The Android Developer Roadmap - Part 2

We’ve broken down the Android developer roadmap into five modules, each covering different aspects of the Android development ecosystem. In the last post, we discussed important elements of Android’s architecture, including the primary Android languages, the OS, the Android Platform, and the App Manifest. In part two, we’ll cover the next three sections of our
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7 min read

AvatarView for Android: Take Your Profile Images to the Next Level

Introducing the AvatarView Library AvatarView supports loading profile images with fractional style, borders, indicators, and initials for Android. It also provides internal image loaders to load profile images with your loading strategies. To show you how useful the API is, this post will show you how to use AvatarView so that you can implement your
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5 min read

Tips & Tricks to Improve Flutter Performance

Held in Oslo, Norway (and more recently online), FlutterVikings is the largest community-driven Flutter conference in the Nordic region. Focused on Flutter and Dart, the conference gathers global Flutter experts from some of the world’s most innovative and well-known tech companies for two days of technical presentations, networking, and connecting with sponsors. Stream was proud
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1 min read

Build Vikings Feb 2022 Winners 🎉

As avid open-source Flutter developers, the Stream team was in full attendance at this year's Flutter Vikings conference. Similar to our previous participation at Flutter Vikings, the team decided to host a codelab and hackathon for the event. For this year's codelab, entrants were required to create a chat application with custom stickers and animations. A daunting task! We
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1 min read

Exploring Jetpack WindowManager for Foldable Devices

Of this new generation of foldable devices, dual-screen devices, which provide symmetrical screens that work together in unique ways, are particularly interesting. But, they also present unique challenges. A key feature of these foldable, responsive UIs is that screen sizes can change in runtime. This means that applications should recognize screen changes in runtime, which
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7 min read

The Android Platform: The 2022 Android Developer Roadmap - Part 1

The 2022 Android Developer Roadmap is designed to give you a comprehensive understanding of the current Android ecosystem and provides suggested learning paths along the way to help you grasp the concepts. In part one of this 5-part series, we’ll start by covering the first four sections of the Android Roadmap: Languages Android OS The
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6 min read

Why Every Flutter Dev Should Care About BuildContext

While the quest for abstraction and the purist’s assertion that all APIs should be simple by design are both noble pursuits, there is a point where too much abstraction becomes harmful and hinders the personal growth of new developers. One of the most common complaints of developers who are new to Flutter is the general
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11 min read

Exploring Material You for Jetpack Compose

You'll learn all about Material You and how you can dynamically import colors from the Material 3 Compose library into our versatile Chat Compose SDK, giving your app a more polished and personalized feel for your users. To show you just how powerful the API is, you'll also learn how to use the Material Theme
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4 min read

macOS Performance Comparison: Flutter Desktop vs. Electron

This article covers the following: The underlying engines and technologies powering Flutter and Electron. Important performance considerations and how they relate to Flutter Desktop and Electron. Real performance metrics demoing example Flutter Desktop and Electron applications on macOS. Before reading on, keep in mind that this article isn’t intended to promote one solution over the
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13 min read

Flutter vs React Native: The Ultimate Comparison

Over the years, it’s become common for developers to compare Flutter and React Native. Both are prevalent multi-platform tools for quickly and easily building mobile applications. If you walk into a developer meetup and ask the question, "What should I pick, Flutter or React Native?", you’re setting the stage for a very spirited debate. In
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12 min read

Building a Production-Ready Chat SDK Using Jetpack Compose

Released in July 2021, Jetpack Compose is the highly anticipated native UI toolkit for Android that is designed to help developers build faster and with more ease. After two years in development, Jetpack Compose is now in its 1.0 version, and is both stable and deeply flexible. Stream’s Lead Android Developer for Jetpack Compose, Filip
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1 min read

Keeping Public API in Check With the Kotlin Binary Validator Plugin

Within the Stream Chat Android SDK project, we use the Kotlin binary compatibility validator plugin to keep track of all the changes we make to our public API. This is a first-party plugin by JetBrains, though it's still experimental (it's an incubator project by JetBrains on GitHub). In this article, you'll learn what the plugin
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5 min read

Add Location Sharing to a Messaging App Using Flutter

A stand-out feature of the most popular messaging applications is the ability to share a user's location quickly and conveniently with trusted peers. Using Stream Chat and Flutter, we can implement a similar feature in very little time. In this article, we will build a small location-sharing chat feature using Flutter, Stream Chat, and the
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15 min read

Clean Chat Example App with Jetpack Compose

Stream now provides a Jetpack Compose Chat SDK. Check out the Compose Chat Messaging Tutorial and give it a try today! We've recently published a Jetpack Compose design sample on Twitter, recreating the Contacts & Messages design by Mickael Guillaume on Dribbble. The source code for this sample is available on GitHub. In this article,
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5 min read

Creating a fast and beautiful chat with Flutter

We all have probably written chat apps multiple times in our lives, and we all know that it takes time! So I always wondered if there is a way to make a custom and beautiful chat app using some lib/service that does all the heavy lifting for me. A few weeks ago, I came across
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6 min read

Announcing the Beta Release of Activity Feeds for Flutter

Today, we are incredibly excited to announce the beta release of Stream’s Feeds SDK for Flutter 🥳. Stream’s Activity Feed API was built by developers, for developers to make their lives easier by not having to worry about scalability, maintenance, and reliability of a complex feed infrastructure. By leveraging Stream’s API or integrating our libraries
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1 min read

Activity Feed Personalization 101: Top Feed Features to Improve User Engagement

Personalization comes in many flavors, and the data science team at Stream can help you build your own feeds personalization engine based on your specific needs. In conjunction with our analytics client we recommend tracking every event for every user, such as clicking on a link) we use both engagement and feed data to power
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4 min read

Jetpack Compose: First Impressions and Learning Resources

As you most certainly already know, Jetpack Compose is the hot new thing for Android UI development. Its promise is to save us by making all the pain points of the old View system and XML layouts go away. Stream now provides a Jetpack Compose Chat SDK. Check out the Compose Chat Messaging Tutorial and
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6 min read

React Native: How To Build Bidirectional Infinite Scroll

Introduction There have been many discussions on Stack Overflow and GitHub around implementing infinite scroll using React Native, on top of FlatList or SectionList. I've found that there aren't any easy solution out there for bidirectional infinite scroll for React Native. Recently, while working on v3.0.0 of React Native Chat SDK at Stream, we had
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5 min read

Swift WebSockets: Starscream or URLSession in 2021?

Building applications such as online games and real-time chat has never been more straightforward since the standardization of the WebSocket protocol in 2011. Before that, most app experiences were plagued with manual refreshes to access the latest data available. Remember F5? Since then, most apps use WebSockets in some form to update their user interface
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4 min read

Singleton vs Dependency Injection in Swift

When coding iOS apps, we often create classes that manage a particular aspect of the application. For example, it's common to develop "manager" classes that encapsulate methods for interacting with a specific application aspect. These aspects commonly include the REST API, WebSockets, database, caching, notifications, chat, etc. That is what's called the Facade pattern, and
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4 min read

Publishing Android libraries to MavenCentral in 2021

Introduction This is an updated version of an article published two years ago on blog.autsoft.hu. This new version supports non-Android libraries, uses command line GPG handling instead of a specific Windows GUI app, includes new best practices, and uses GitHub Actions for its CI integration. Update, April 2021: addressed new Sonatype infra, moved to using
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19 min read

Announcing Flutter SDK 1.0.0 Beta

At Stream, we are always trying to find new ways to help developers build great apps in as little time as possible. That's why today, we are thrilled to announce the release of our new Flutter Chat SDK and not one but two new Stream Flutter packages 🚀. Our goal with this release is to
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3 min read

Tutorial: How to Build a Slack Clone with React Native - Part 3

Note: This blog is archived due to limited compatibility with an old version of the React Native chat SDK. Please check our latest tutorial or our finished Slack clone. In Part 2 of this tutorial, we covered how to build Slack-like navigation, channel list screen, channel screen, reaction picker, and action sheet. In this tutorial,
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4 min read

Tutorial: How to Build a Slack Clone with React Native - Part 2

Note: This blog is archived due to limited compatibility with an old version of the React Native chat SDK. Please check our latest tutorial or our finished Slack clone. React Native has come a long way since its first release in 2015. In fact, it has enough components, APIs, and supporting libraries in its present
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7 min read

Announcing Experimental Multi-Platform Support for the Stream Flutter SDK

Stream is always looking out for the next big thing in developer tools to build new applications. React Native was one of the first mobile development framework supported by our SDKs and is still going strong. We announced support for Dart/Flutter in February of 2020. Flutter has been one of our fastest-growing integrations since -
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2 min read

Choose Your iOS Dependencies Wisely

Dependencies are vital for most iOS projects. They allow us to speed up development and not reinvent the wheel every time we need components such as networking, rendering, chat, calendar, and many others which can be common to different types of projects. It's also an efficient way of deferring code maintenance to a company or
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4 min read

How to use GitHub with Android Studio

Android Studio makes it easy to push changes to your favorite Open Source, professional, or personal projects on GitHub. In this tutorial, we'll learn how to use GitHub with Android Studio. We'll use an Open Source contribution for context. Android developers use Open Source projects to speed up development or enable functionality that is otherwise
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4 min read

Tutorial: How to Build a Slack Clone with React Native - Part 1

Note: This blog is archived due to limited compatibility with an old version of the React Native chat SDK. Please check our latest tutorial or our finished Slack clone. React Native has a significant footprint in the mobile development world. And with every new release, it gets better and better in terms of development speed
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10 min read

Styled Components vs. CSS Stylesheets

Over the last few years, CSS-in-JS solutions have become prevalent across the front-end landscape with many offerings such as styled-components, and emotion that provides a way to colocate your components and style definitions. The power of these libraries lies in the ability to use JavaScript features to enhance reusability & easily create a design system
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10 min read

Stream Is Deprecating Virtual Go – It’s Time to Move to Go Modules

TL;DR Stream released vg almost three years ago, and since its inception, Go has improved quite a bit in regards to its dependency management. Since Go has come so far, we’re now advocating that the community use native Go modules rather than vg. The Gist Stream provides an API as a service to build highly
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3 min read

Rolling a Custom Docs CMS with Slate and Django REST Framework

The Rundown In 2019 we realized we had a big problem here at Stream. Our documentation for Feeds and Chat was outdated, hard to navigate, and difficult to update due to legacy systems that were in place. We made it a goal to set out and build the best documentation site available to the developers
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5 min read

Prevent Native Race Conditions with React’s Context API

Here on the Stream Services team, we have the pleasure of working with a variety of clients and get to solve exciting challenges daily. This blog post provides a peek into one such occasion by highlighting the intricacies of building a native app in Javascript, and the creative solutions that inevitably must arise to support
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4 min read

Create a GraphQL API with Node, Mongoose, and Express

GraphQL is a technology that helps developers across the board to build more robust software more quickly. The ability to request all of the information you need in a single request is a game-changer. It has simplified my backend development of APIs for consumption by mobile and web applications that would normally rely on RESTful
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6 min read

MongoDB vs. DocumentDB: Which Is Right for You?

Are you trying to decide if you should use MongoDB or DocumentDB? With the recent controversy surrounding licensing with MongoDB, it can be confusing to decide which option is right for your company or project. Amazon decided the core MongoDB code is challenging to scale while remaining highly available. Amazon wrote their implementation, which is
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5 min read

Crafting a Command Line Experience that Developers Love

If you’re setting out to build a highly usable developer tool, it goes without saying that a proper CLI to interface with your API is paramount. As Zeit and Heroku have been setting the tone for these types of developer tools by doing extensive research into best practices when it comes to a command line “experience”, we started our
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11 min read

How a Go Program Compiles down to Machine Code

Here at Stream, we use Go extensively, and it has drastically improved our productivity. We have also found that by using Go, the speed is outstanding and since we started using it, we have implemented mission-critical portions of our stack, such as our in-house storage engine powered by gRPC, Raft, and RocksDB. Today we are
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9 min read

Go 1.11 Rocket Tutorial

This tutorial combines two of my favorite things, the Go programming language and images of SpaceX rocket launches. With Go rapidly picking up adoption in the developer community, its becoming one of the leading languages for building backend systems. Go’s performance is similar to Java and C++, yet it’s almost as easy to write as
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17 min read

Google Feed Personalization and Recommender Systems

Lately, I’ve been using Google’s feed on Android and it contains several interesting best practices for content discovery. Google’s feed strikes an effective balance between machine learning and follow relationships. With the recent advancements in AI, it can be hard to know when to apply AI and when to use a more manual method. This
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4 min read

JavaScript: Promises and Why Async/Await Wins the Battle

Asynchronous functions are a good and bad thing in JavaScript. The good side is that asynchronous functions are non-blocking and, therefore, are fast – especially in a Node.js context. The downside is that dealing with asynchronous functions can be cumbersome, as you sometimes have to wait for one function to complete in order to get
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5 min read

Simple Steps to Optimize Your App Performance with MongoDB, Redis, and Node.js

First Things First Here at Stream, we power activity feeds for 300+ million end users and love playing around with ways to utilize our product in all sorts of use cases. Most recently, we built Winds, an open-source RSS and Podcast application with a strong focus on UI and UX. Shortly after we launched our
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12 min read

Building an End-to-End Deep Learning GitHub Discovery Feed

There's hardly a developer who doesn’t use GitHub. With all those stars, pulls, pushes and merges, GitHub has a plethora of data available describing the developer universe. As a Data Scientist at Stream, my job is to develop recommender systems for our clients so that they can provide a better user experience for their customers. With that said, I wanted to see if I could build a recommendation
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11 min read

Testing Node.js in 2018

Stream powers feeds for over 300+ million end users. With all of those users relying on our infrastructure, we’re very good about testing everything that gets pushed into production. Our primary codebase is written in Go, with some remaining bits of Python. Our recent showcase application, Winds 2.0, is built with Node.js and we quickly
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9 min read

React Fragments - The End of the Wrapper Div

Hi there! I’m Ken. I’m a Developer Advocate over at GetStream.io, where we build personalized and scalable activity feeds. For the last several months, I’ve been working on Winds 2.0, an open-source RSS reader and podcast listening app. It’s built in Node.js, Electron, Redux and React, and as of this writing, has over 5,000 stars
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6 min read

Fixing the billion dollar mistake in Go by borrowing from Rust

panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference If you ever used Go, you probably saw this error at least once. Somewhere a nil pointer or nil interface was passed to a function that doesn’t handle nil. In all cases this is a programming error, either the function should handle nil or the
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7 min read

Go Client Now Available

Go is one of the fastest growing languages around. We ourselves use it extensively inside the Stream API service. Support for Go was added almost two years ago by MrHenry and HyperWorks, which open-sourced a Go client. We are proud to announce that starting today, we are releasing our official Go API client. You can
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3 min read

Building a Node.js Powered API with Express, Mongoose & MongoDB

One of my favorite parts of my job as a Developer Evangelist at Stream is building sample applications. It is an enthralling way to engage and interact with potential and existing customers, as well as show off the fun technology we use and build with every single day. The applications I build range from small
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6 min read

Moving Beyond EdgeRank for Personalized Newsfeeds

This blog post is broken into two parts and harkens back to learnings from a prior post. The sum of all these parts is altogether my best effort to provide you with a framework of how to take the creation of personalized news feeds to the next level. Part 1: Theory behind a very basic
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6 min read

Using .IO Domain Names for Production Traffic

We're currently updating this article. Please check back soon. In the meantime, check out these helpful resources: APIs: Feeds, Messaging UI Kits: Feeds, Messaging Tutorials: Feeds, Messaging
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0 min read

Building Your Own Instagram Discovery Engine: A Step-By-Step Tutorial

Isn’t it great how Instagram’s “Explore” section displays content that matches your interests? When you open the application, the content and recommendations shown are almost always relevant to your specific likes, interests, connections, etc. While it may be fun to think we’re the center of the Instagram universe, the reality is that personalized, relevant content
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7 min read

Why we switched from Python to Go

Updated May 14th 2019 to better reflect improvements to Go in the last 2 years (package management, better performance, faster compile times and a more mature ecosystem) Switching to a new language is always a big step, especially when only one of your team members has prior experience with that language. Early this year, we
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10 min read

JavaScript Frontend Framework CLI Showdown

Many modern JavaScript frontend frameworks are complemented by a standalone Command Line Interface (CLI) program that assists with setting up a suitable development environment. Since many developers who work with Stream also use one or more of these frameworks, we like to stay up to date. We're also happy to pass on what we’ve learned.
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7 min read

Testing Go at Stream

Stream’s API is used in production by more than 500 companies and 200 million end users. While we like to move fast, we definitely don’t like to break things. An extensive test infrastructure enables us to move quickly and deploy code with confidence. A solid testing workflow is essential to stay productive as your team
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10 min read

Follow Recommendations in Social Networks

Social media is a series of networks connecting individuals, companies, organizations, and groups to one another. These networks can transcend local, national, and international borders connecting people to networks far and wide. With all those connections, how can a user find the ones that they want to connect with? That’s where follow suggestions come in.
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4 min read

Adding TypeScript Type Definitions to the Stream JavaScript API Client Library

TypeScript is a language that Stream has been interested in for quite some time. Over the past year, we've had an increasing number conversations with TypeScript and Angular developers. So naturally, it's been our ambition to eventually distribute Type Definitions for our JavaScript API Client library. That time has come. The process of coding Type
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4 min read

Examining Decentralized Social Networks

Most companies who create a social media network do so with the end goal of collecting information, interests and habits of their users in order to monetize that data (usually through advertising). They guard this data heavily and many of the largest social networks are trusted enough to be Identity Providers for OAuth-based authentication and
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8 min read

Best Practices for Recommendation Engines

In this blogpost I will describe how to implement a feature-rich activity feed that will make relevant and accurate personalization algorithms easier to implement. As we have already explored in previous blog posts, app personalization is linking activity feeds and user engagement data. In most cases, a well thought out feed structure provides valuable information
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3 min read

Building a Performant API using Go and Cassandra

Introduction Software performance is critical to a SaaS company like Stream and while the majority of our infrastructure is written in Python, we are actively porting portions of our code base to Go. Stream is an API for building scalable feeds and now handles over 20 billion feed updates a month. While Python has been
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27 min read

Factorization Machines for Recommendation Systems

As a Data Scientist that works on Feed Personalization, I find it it important to stay up to date with the current state of Machine Learning and its applications. Most of the time, using some of the better-known recommendation algorithms yields good initial results; however, sometimes a change in the model is essential to provide customers
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6 min read

Example Ranking Methods for Your Feeds

In this short tutorial we will show you how to use Custom Ranking for your activity streams and news feeds. By default all feeds on Stream are ranked chronologically. Custom ranking allows you to take full control over how your feeds are sorted. Some common use cases include: Showing popular activities higher in the feed
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4 min read

In Depth Guide on Building a REST API with Node.js, Restify & MongoDB

Update for August 2017: This guide has been updated for Restify 5 and Mongo 3.4 with modern Javascript practices. Clone the Github repo to get the full working project. Choosing the Technology With the multitude of JavaScript frameworks and databases available nowadays, there are countless options for building APIs. For this guide, we're working with
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8 min read

Personalization & Machine Learning for News Feeds and Social Networks

Winds is an open source RSS reader is powered by React, Redux, Sails and Stream. This tutorial explains how we’ve built personalization for Winds, as an example of how using Stream makes it easy to build personalized feeds. About Personalization Personalization is a very broad concept. In this case, personalization equates to leveraging engagement data
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5 min read

An Introduction to Contextual Bandits

In this post I discuss the Multi Armed Bandit problem and its applications to feed personalization. First, I will use a simple synthetic example to visualize arm selection in with bandit algorithms, I also evaluate the performance of some of the best known algorithms on a dataset for musical genre recommendations. What is a Multi-Armed Bandit? Imagine
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6 min read

How to Setup a Highly Available Multi-AZ Cassandra Cluster on AWS EC2

Originally built by Facebook in 2009, Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source distributed database designed to handle large amounts of data across a large number of servers. Cassandra at Stream At Stream, we use Cassandra as the primary data store for our feeds. Cassandra stands out because it’s able to: Shard data automatically Handle
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0 min read

Fast Recommendations for Activity Streams Using Vowpal Wabbit

The problem of content discovery and recommendation is very common in many machine learning applications: social networks, news aggregators and search engines are constantly updating and tweaking their algorithms to give individual users a unique experience. Personalization engines suggest relevant content with the objective of maximizing a specific metric. For example: a news website might want to increase
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5 min read

React/Redux - Best Practices & Gotchas

This is a bonus post in the Cabin tutorial series created by getstream.io. Visit getstream.io/cabin for an overview of all the tutorials, as well as a live demo. The source code can be found on the Stream GitHub repository for Cabin, and all blog posts can be found at their respective links below: Introduction React
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8 min read

Building News Feeds & Activity Streams With Meteor

We are happy to announce stream-meteor. This integration library makes it easy to build scalable newsfeeds and activity streams for your Meteor app.
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6 min read

Stream JavaScript & Node Client (V3)

Version 3 of the JavaScript & Node library adds support for new Stream API features, reduces the size of the distributable JavaScript file, creates library documentation pages, and improves browser compatibility of our client.
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1 min read