development

“Can I safely use this new release?” When you’re a developer maintaining a piece of software, this is a question you ask every time you update one of its dependencies. How do you answer that question? Read the CHANGELOG? Release notes? Pray? No, you look at the version (first, at least). How to interpret that version generally depends on the project, but I’m personally partial to semantic versioning. I think it serves as an elegant contract between dependency author and consumer that can be used to easily answer this question....

When I first started learning Rails back in the day, it was my first introduction to Ruby: I was learning them both at the same time. As a result, the line between them was rather blurry; I didn’t know what was coming from Ruby, and what was coming from Rails. The Rails approach of monkey-patching Ruby didn’t help. If I’m being honest, I didn’t realize that Object#blank? wasn’t a Ruby method until only a few years ago....

UPDATE: I’m leaving this series up for historical purposes, but please note that I no longer recommend Ubuntu Core or snaps for use in robotics. This is the fifth (and final) blog post in this series about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In the previous post we discussed methods of control, did a little math, and wrote the ROS driver for our robot. But it still required several nodes to be running at once, and sharing it with the world involved uploading your source code somewhere and convincing people to install ROS, build your package, and use it....

UPDATE: I’m leaving this series up for historical purposes, but please note that I no longer recommend Ubuntu Core or snaps for use in robotics. This is the fourth blog post in this series about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In the previous post we worked on getting data out of the wireless controller and into ROS in a format meant for controlling differential drive robots like ours: the Twist message....

UPDATE: I’m leaving this series up for historical purposes, but please note that I no longer recommend Ubuntu Core or snaps for use in robotics. This is the third blog post in this series about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In the previous post you were introduced to the Robot Operating System (ROS), and got your robot moving by ROSifying one of the CamJam worksheets. Today we’re going to move beyond the CamJam worksheets, and work toward having our robot remotely controlled by focusing on our wireless controller: getting data out of it and into ROS messages....