Our Blog

Rails developer job opening

By Jon Jensen
November 3, 2021

This position has been filled. See our active job listings here.

Photo by WOCinTech Chat, CC BY 2.0, cropped

We are seeking a full-time Ruby on Rails software developer based in the United States to work with us on our clients’ applications.

End Point Dev is an Internet technology consulting company based in New York City, with 50 employees serving many clients ranging from small family businesses to large corporations. The company is going strong after 26 years in business!

Even before the pandemic most of us worked remotely from home offices. We collaborate using SSH, Git, project tracking tools, Zulip chat, video conferencing, and of course email and phones.

What you will be doing:

• Develop new web applications and support existing ones for our clients.
• Work together with End Point Dev co-workers and our clients’ in-house staff.
• Use your desktop operating system of choice: Linux, macOS, or Windows.
• Enhance open source software and contribute back as opportunity arises.

You’ll need professional development experience with:

• 4+ years of development with Ruby on Rails
• JavaScript frameworks and libraries such as Vue.js, React, Angular
• Databases such as PostgreSQL, Redis, Solr, Elasticsearch, etc.
• Security consciousness, such as under …

Generating TOTP QR codes as Unicode text from the command line

By Bharathi Ponnusamy
October 28, 2021

(QR = “Quick Response” — good to know!)

Python’s QR code generator library qrcode generates QR codes from a secret key and outputs to a terminal using Unicode characters, not a PNG graphic as most other libraries do. We can store that in a text file. This is a neat thing to do, but how is this functionality useful?

Benefits of having Unicode QR code as a text file:

• Storing the QR code as a text file takes less disk space than a PNG image.
• It is easy to read the QR code over ssh using the cat command; you don’t even have to download the file to your own workstation.
• It is simpler to manage QR codes in Git as text files than as PNG images.

This can be used for any kind of QR code, but we have found it especially useful for managing shared multi-factor authentication (MFA, including 2FA for 2-factor authentication) secrets for TOTPs (Time-based One-Time Passwords).

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Many services provide a separate account and login for each user so that accounts do not need to be shared, and thus passwords and multi-factor authentication secrets do not need to be shared either. This is ideal, and what we insist on for our most important accounts. …

.NET Conf 2021 is coming!

By Juan Pablo Ventoso
October 27, 2021

It’s that time of the year again! It has been almost one year since .NET 5 was launched at .NET Conf 2020, unifying .NET Framework and .NET Core into a single open-source and cross-platform framework. With .NET 6 around the corner, it’s time to prepare for the new edition, .NET Conf 2021, starting on November 9th.

This edition will be the 11th online conference, and the Agenda will mainly focus on the .NET 6 launch and the new C# 10, along with some coding challenges and community sessions. The event is organized by both the .NET community and Microsoft. The main changes that will likely be discussed at the conference, based on what we’ve seen through the previews, might include:

Mobile development

We will see several changes to how web mobile app development works under .NET 6. With a smaller, optimized, and optional SDK for mobile based on Xamarin, now called Multi-platform App UI or MAUI, developing an app that targets multiple mobile platforms should be simpler than ever.

Hot reload (after some struggling)

The Hot Reload feature, which will allow us to make and apply changes to the code at execution time, will be finally available in .NET 6. There was some …

Moving to EndPointDev.com

By Rick Peltzman
October 21, 2021

Hello to all our cherished clients and friends. I am excited to make an announcement!

End Point has changed our domain name from EndPoint.com to EndPointDev.com.

While our official legal name remains End Point Corporation, we are also updating our branding to match our new domain name. You will notice on our website that we are now referring to ourselves as End Point Dev, the “Dev” being short for “development.”

There are many companies named End Point and there has been a little confusion about this over the years. None of the other End Points (or “Endpoints”) do the type of development work that we do. They range from a utility company to a title insurance company to a medical lab services company and beyond. In our quest to separate ourselves and distinguish who we are, we are transitioning to EndPointDev.com.

From now on you will receive email from, and send email to, your contacts here with their new suffix-adjusted domain names, e.g., instead of rick@endpoint.com use rick@endpointdev.com. After December 1, 2021, expect your emails to bounce back if you do not use the new and correct email address.

This change also holds true for our group/​alias addresses that you may be …

Job opening: Systems Programmer

By Matt Vollrath
October 13, 2021

This position has been filled. See our active job listings here.

End Point is an Internet technology company with headquarters in New York City and an office in Johnson City, Tennessee. The majority of our 50 employees work remotely. We provide consulting, development, and support services to many clients ranging from small family businesses to large corporations. We also develop and support an immersive visualization product called Liquid Galaxy.

Job Description

We are looking for a C++ developer to join our team full-time to develop new custom software solutions and improve existing ones for our clients. The person in this position will work collaboratively with our talented team of developers to design, implement, test, debug, and maintain systems software.

Responsibilities

• Create reusable, effective, secure, and scalable C++ code.
• Translate technical requirements into code.
• Identify bottlenecks and bugs in the system and develop solutions.
• Troubleshoot and ensure that software applications are running correctly.

Skills and Qualifications

• English language proficiency
• Preferably based in the United States
• Strong technical and communication skills
• 4+ years of professional experience developing software using C++
• Proficiency with …

Vue GraphQL integration using Apollo Client

By Daniel Gomm
October 8, 2021

Photo by Mathew Benoit on Unsplash

Introduction

In this post I’ll go over everything you need to know to get your Vue app using GraphQL to send and receive data. This post only covers the frontend — stay tuned for my next post on making a GraphQL server using Django and graphene-python!

For the uninitiated: GraphQL is a query language that aims to replace the traditional REST API. The idea is that, instead of having separate endpoints for each resource in your API, you use one endpoint that accepts GraphQL queries and mutations for all of your resources. Overall, this makes data access on the frontend more like querying a database. Not only does it give you more control over your data, but it also can be much faster than using a REST API, providing a better user experience.

Getting started

To get your Vue app set up using GraphQL we’ll need to do two things. First, we’ll install vue-apollo (a Vue plugin for the Apollo GraphQL client) as well as apollo-boost, which bootstraps the configuration of Apollo. With these you’ll be able to:

• Manually run GraphQL queries and mutations from any Vue component via the this.$apollo helper
• Automatically map GraphQL queries to …

Liquid Galaxy Hackathon 2021

By Seth Jensen
October 2, 2021

A few months ago we had our first company gathering since the pandemic started. About 20 End Pointers came to our New York City office to work on various Liquid Galaxy projects, and for several of us, to meet each other in person for the first time.

Except for our NYC-based team, this was everyone’s first look at the “new” office; we moved offices in January of 2020, so COVID-19 shut down about 14 months of office use.

Our CMS team worked on some exciting updates to our Liquid Galaxy CMS, including implementing new and improved techonologies for the database and user interface.

The CMS team: Zed, Dan, and Jeff

Our Research and Development team worked on upgrades to the Liquid Galaxy itself, focusing on creating smoother transitions for multimedia presentations. This included a custom window manager created by Matt, dubbed “Matt WM” by the team.

Will, Matt, Jacob, and Neil, hard at work

Our support team worked on spinning up documentation and data entry to bring our inventory up to date and prepare for the next wave of installations.

Darius hacking away

It was great to see everyone at the NYC office, working elbow to elbow. We saw plenty of the …

Liquid Galaxy Screen Share Integration

By Alejandro Ramon
September 29, 2021

End Point’s Immersive and Geospatial Division is proud to announce the rollout of our new Screen Share Integration as an extension to the Liquid Galaxy platform’s capabilities. The additional hardware and software configuration can be added to existing installations or included in a solution provided by our sales team.

Screen Share Integration uses ClickShare, a well-regarded enterprise-grade wireless screen sharing tool already used in the offices of many of our commercial real estate clients. With Screen Share Integration you can push a button to share laptop, desktop, phone, and tablet content directly onto the displays of the Liquid Galaxy or onto an integrated side screen. We expect this to be useful for clients who are interested in sharing videos, spreadsheets, and other ad-hoc interactive media directly from their devices to supplement the main content on screen.

Why we created this

In an effort to expand the flexibility of the Liquid Galaxy platform, we thought about what tools our current clients are already using. We acknowledge that there are limitations to the interactivity of certain content types on the platform, and ClickShare is a useful tool for wireless sharing …