Post-it Code

About a month ago, we noticed that embedding YouTube videos in our mobile app (iOS & Android) started returning Error 15 or Error 153 . These embeds had been working for years with no code changes on our side. We discovered that many other developers were seeing the same error, especially in webviews inside apps, so the timing was curious. The likely cause It appears that YouTube’s embed policy enforcement has tightened: if the embed request originates from an app or webview that does not supply a valid Referer or Origin , YouTube may refuse to play the video (hence the 15/153 error codes). This meshes with policy guidance in the YouTube “Required Minimum Functionality” documentation, which states that apps must provide certain identifying information including origin. Source:  Google for Developers Additionally, many mobile WebView implementations (on iOS & Android) often send an empty or missing referer header by default, which then leads to this embed rejection. Ou...

Mac, always running out of space, especially if you're a developer (Xcode, argh!). This isn’t a new find, but since I just ran through it again, I figured it’s worth posting here for my own reference and maybe it’ll help someone else squeeze out that last bit of disk space. Here you go:  How to do I clear system data on Mac OS?

Another daily muse. It’s not surprising that our technical team continues to discover unused functions within a particular feature library. Although the names of these functions may sound promising, the logic inside is often outdated, as they haven’t been refactored to align with the current context of the feature. Some of these functions were written ages ago. This is where I need to borrow a concept from my university days, when my mates and I often applied Extreme Programming (XP) principles in our software projects. The core idea: Don’t add functionality until it’s actually needed. This is essentially the You Aren't Gonna Need It (YAGNI) philosophy. To quote Ron Jeffries, a co-founder of XP, as taken from Wikipedia: "Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you [will] need them."

Today, I stumbled upon a simple read on Reddit that serves as a reminder for both new and seasoned programmers about the importance of Domain-Driven Development (DDD). The post shared this article by Google: Write Change-Resilient Code with Domain-Driven Design . While it just touches on DDD, it's good enough to raise awareness. In case DDD is new to you, here’s a brief description from Wikipedia: Domain-Driven Development is a major software design approach that focuses on modeling software to match a domain based on input from that domain’s experts. DDD opposes the idea of having a single, unified model. Instead, it divides a large system into bounded contexts, each with its own model. For a more in-depth exploration of DDD, here are some useful articles: DDD 101: The 5-Minute Tour Domain-Driven Design (DDD) From my perspective, the DDD concept allows for simpler collaboration between technical teams and domain experts through the use of a consistent language. It also reduces th...

"Chaos Engineering" is a rather cool IT discipline, but I haven't had the privilege of implementing it—perhaps because the systems I work with are never complex enough to require such a high degree of redundancy. Essentially, chaos engineering involves testing a system by introducing controlled faults or failures to identify its weaknesses and ensure it can handle unexpected disruptions. Examples of Chaos Engineering : Killing servers or nodes in a High Availability configuration to see if the service continues to run as expected. Introducing latency between servers/nodes (in a microservices environment) to observe how the system handles slow communication. Why It’s Important : Proactive Resilience : It helps you uncover weaknesses before they escalate into actual incidents, enabling teams to build more resilient systems. Improved Incident Response : By simulating real-world failures, teams gain valuable experience in handling outages, making them better equipped to resp...

Thanks to the advent of accessible LLMs like ChatGPT, translating a language pack for an application is now easy and quick. There was a time when we relied on Google Sheets with the translate function for this task—not only was it difficult to maintain, but it was also less accurate. With tools like ChatGPT, translations can be customised for an application’s context, and most importantly, the format of the language pack is easily retained. You can simply copy the translated pack as a ready-to-use file without needing any further processing. Cost effective and efficient! Try this step-by-step : Load your language pack (e.g., JSON, XML). Paste it into ChatGPT, specifying context, desired tone, and any important instructions. Copy the translated output and use it directly in your app. This is a simple example (I think the instructions could be written better, pardon me).