Author: Nick Cosentino

This author has written 432 articles
Game Development / Personal Project Updates / Unity3D

Ascending to the Next Level – RPG Dev Weekly #1

As I've been trying to get more YouTube content put together more steadily, one of the themes I'm interested in is doing some behind-the-scenes of the role playing game (RPG) I'm making with some friends in Unity3D. I've found that being able to work on an RPG outside of my regular day job is a really awesome way for me to keep up on my technical skills. I love coding, and the further along I move in my career as an engineering manager, the less time I actually spend writing code myself. I pride myself in being a technical engineering manager, so for me working on this RPG is a great outlet for creativity and practice. I mentioned this in my LinkedIn post here: Persisting Game Objects Across Maps In this video, I focus on one of the challenges the…

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May 2, 2021
Productivity

Timeboxing: Evolving the TODO List to be More Effective

I recently wrote about TODO lists and how they can help with focus now that many of us are working from home. I had a former colleague on LinkedIn mention this concept of "timeboxing" (which I think many people are familiar with the general idea) and how that can improve the effectiveness of a TODO list. I had made a post on LinkedIn sharing my blog article, and here's a comment that came in right away from Graeme Harvey: This obviously got me thinking because sure, Elon Musk is a pretty smart dude, but I also have a lot of respect for Graeme and his perspective on things. So I decided I'd try something out! TODO Lists v1.0 My original TODO lists didn't factor in any timeboxing techniques, but they had some benefits. The engineering mind in me says this…

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April 3, 2020
Android / Autofac / C# / .NET / dotnet / CodeProject / Mobile Development / Programming / Tutorial

Xamarin Forms – Jumpstart Your App With Autofac

I love dependency injection frameworks ever since I started using them. Specifically, I'm obsessed with using Autofac and I have a hard time developing applications unless I can use a solid DI framework like Autofac! I've recently been working with Xamarin and found that I wanted to use dependency injection, but some of the framework doesn't support this well out of the box. I' was adamant to get something going though, so I wanted to show you my way to make this work. Disclaimer: In its current state, this is certainly a bit of a hack. I'll explain why I've taken this approach though! In your Android projects for Xamarin, any class that inherits from Activity is responsible for being created by the framework. This means where we'd usually have the luxury of passing in dependencies via a constructor and…

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April 1, 2020
Programming / Software Engineering

Downtime? Easy Path to Learning By Building!

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many of us to stay isolated and at home, but that's OK! I genuinely enjoy developing software and wanted to take this opportunity to focus on learning. Having some downtime has afforded me to try putting together a system that I otherwise might not have explored building. In this article, I'll share different aspects about an application I'm building that purposefully put me outside of my comfort zone. In my opinion, having downtime is an opportunity to learn and grow! It's time to take advantage of that. When the app and system is ready to showcase I'll share more insight into what's actually being built! The Client Framework The application being built was intended to run on multiple mobile platforms, so Xamarin was my choice here. I have briefly used Xamarin several years ago, but…

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March 29, 2020
CodeProject / Programming

Firebase and Low-Effort User Management

I've found myself with some additional time to be creative during the great COVID-19 and lockdown/quarantine days. That's why there's more blog posts recently! Actually, I wanted to take the time to experiment with some unfamiliar technologies and build something. For a project, I wanted to leverage authentication but I'm well aware that user management can become a really complex undertaking. I had heard about Firebase from Google and wanted to give it a shot. For the purposes of this discussion, Firebase would allow me to create something like an OAuth proxy to the system I wanted to build, and by doing so, would end up managing all of the users for me. What I needed to do with Firebase to get that setup was actually quite straight forward. First, you start off in typical fashion registering for Firebase. From…

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March 26, 2020
Programming / Software Engineering

CircleCI + BitBucket => Free Continuous Integration!

CircleCI is a service that I heard about from a friend that allows you to get continuous integration pipelines built up for your repositories... And it does it quick and easy. Also, free if you're someone like me and you don't have a large demand for getting builds done! I wanted to write about my experience with getting CircleCI wired up with BitBucket, which I like to use for my project hosting, and hopefully it'll help you get started. First thing, signing up is super easy if you have BitBucket because you can oauth right away with it. CircleCI will show you your projects & repositories that you have in BitBucket and you can decide which one you'd like to get started with. You can navigate to the projects in their new UI from the "Add Projects" menu. When you…

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March 25, 2020

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