Our Blog

What’s the deal with ASP.NET Core Razor Pages?

By Kevin Campusano
November 20, 2018

During the last couple of years I’ve been doing lots of web development with technologies like JavaScript and PHP and Zend Framework, with a strong focus on the front end. Before that, however, the vast majority of the work I did as a web developer was with the .NET Framework.

I love .NET. Particularly the C# language. However, the greatest thing about .NET is the vibrant ecosystem full of tools (the Visual Studio IDE, for example, is outstanding), libraries and frameworks that make one’s life easier and more productive. It has, however, a crucial weakness that prevents it from reaching even greater heights: it’s locked to Windows systems. So, whenever the need comes to develop something outside of a Windows environment, you’re out of luck.

So, naturally, when Microsoft announced their initiative to make the .NET Framework open source and bring it to other platforms a few years ago, I was really excited. Fast forward to today and we have .NET Core as the product of great effort from both Microsoft and the community.

I’ve definitely kept it on my radar since its inception back in 2016, but haven’t had the chance to take a really deep dive and see what the technology is about and …

End Point at Google for Kenya

By Will Plaut
November 2, 2018

Last month End Point had the great pleasure of exhibiting a Liquid Galaxy in Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi at the first Google for Kenya event.

Kenya is home to the first Google office in Africa (opened 11 years ago) and Google is planning on growing its involvement in the country. The event was part of Google’s Next Billion Users initiative, and centered around some big announcements for Kenya. Google announced major financial commitments to a broad range of goals aimed at spurring innovation and they also announced the release of Street View for Kenya!

In July we did a similar Next Billion Users Google event in Lagos, Nigeria. The Nigerian event was open to the public and had around 7,000 guests so it was a nice change of pace to have only a couple hundred guests at the Google for Kenya event.

The Liquid Galaxy was center stage and guests took turns finding Street Views of their houses/​apartments and then looking through the spectacular Street View scenes from across the country. The Street View of the Tusks of Mombasa seemed to put a smile on everyone’s face. My personal favorite was a panosphere taken from a drone of the great wildebeest migration in Maasai Mara. …

How I Learn New Technologies

By Árpád Lajos
October 30, 2018

Photo by Marco Verch · CC BY 2.0, modified

If a developer has plenty of time, then the best way to learn a technology is to read a book about it, solve the tasks the book presents, and then to do some very basic work just to get some real-world experience. When this is done, one might want to watch some tutorial videos, consult with people who are either also learning, or, even better, are experienced in the given technology.

When someone gets comfortable with a dev stack, the person might be inclined to prefer to work only in his or her comfort zone. In consulting, this is feasible in the majority of cases. But what if someone gets a new project in a different software stack? Is it a big problem? In my opinion, it’s not a problem, if we are able to determine the minimal knowledge we need to get started. So how can a developer quickly grasp the essence of the problem space? Where are answers to the most frequent questions reachable?

In 2008 I graduated from the university and was looking for a job. In the middle of the world economic crisis new programmers had limited chances at getting a job. So I began accepting very small projects from varied clients, all using vastly different …

Image Recognition Tools

By Muhammad Najmi bin Ahmad Zabidi
October 10, 2018

I’m always impressed with the advancement of machine learning, and, more recently, deep learning. However, since I am not an expert in the field I decided to let the researchers and scholars elaborate more on them.

In this post I will share the existing tools and the associated libraries to make them work, at least for me.

The reason I explored these tools is simple: I plan to deploy a poor man’s security camera in my home with some “sense” of intelligence. Since I am working at home, I want to know who is actually knocking my door. So I thought, what if I could use a web cam to monitor my door and let me know who’s actually standing at the door?

Face Detection

I searched around for existing face detection software and found this Python script using Haarcascade. So I was able to detect faces, but upon sharing the “findings” with a friend he said this only detects faces. How would the computer be able to recognize who’s who? Then I stumbled upon the phrase “face recognition”.

You might have noticed that if you use the image file that you import directly from your smartphone, the output will be displayed in a large file to the screen. You can use ImageMagick to resize the file to …

Immersive and GIS Developer Job Opening

By Benjamin Goldstein
October 2, 2018

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

We are looking for a full-time, salaried engineer to help us further develop our software, infrastructure, and hardware integration for our shared immersive system, End Point Liquid Galaxy.

What you will be doing:

• Develop new software involving 3D GIS, panoramic video, Google Earth, a custom CMS, and ROS (Robot Operating System)
• Improve the system with automation, monitoring, and customizing configurations to customers’ needs
• Provide remote and occasional on-​site troubleshooting and support at customer locations
• Build tours and supporting tools for emerging markets
• Integrate and test new hardware to work with the system

What you will need:

• Sharp troubleshooting ability
• Experience with “devops” automation tools such as Chef
• Strong programming experience in one or more of these languages:
  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • C/C++
  • Ruby
• Linux system administration skills
• A customer-​centered focus
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Experience directing your own work, and working remotely as part of a team
• Enthusiasm for learning new technologies

Bonus points for experience with:

• Contributing to open source projects
• Working with GIS, e.g., ESRI, Mapbox, Open Street Map, KML, …

Building Rasters in PostGIS

By Josh Tolley
September 12, 2018

In a past blog post I described a method I’d used to digest raw statistics from the Mexican government statistics body, INEGI, quantifying the relative educational level of residents in Mexico City. In the post, I divided these data into squares geographically, and created a KML visualization consisting of polygons, where each polygon’s color and height reflected the educational level of residents in the corresponding area. Where the original data proved slow to render and difficult to interpret, the result after processing was visually appealing, intuitively meaningful, and considerably more performant. Plus I got to revisit a favorite TV show, examine SQL’s Common Table Expressions, and demonstrate their use in building complex queries.

But the post left a few loose ends untied. For instance, the blog post built the visualization using just one large query. Although its CTE-based design rendered it fairly readable, the query remained far too complex, and far too slow, at least for general use. Doing everything in one query makes for a sometimes enjoyable mental exercise, but it also means the query has to start from zero, every time it runs, so iterative development bogs down …

Job opening: .NET/​C# and JavaScript developer

By Jon Jensen
August 30, 2018

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

Photo by #WOCinTech Chat · CC BY 2.0, modified

We are looking for another talented full-time software developer to join us, working with .NET and C# on Windows, JavaScript, and at least one of PHP, Java, or Ruby.

If you like to solve business problems and can take responsibility for getting a job done well without intensive oversight, please read on!

End Point is a 23-year-old web consulting company based in New York City, with about 50 employees, the majority working remotely from home offices. We collaborate using SSH and Remote Desktop, GitLab, GitHub, chat, Hangouts and other conferencing software, and good old email and phones.

We serve over 200 clients ranging from small family businesses to large corporations.

We are experts in web development, databases, and DevOps, and we use mostly open source frameworks, in a variety of languages, on Linux and Windows.

What you will need:

• Professional experience building reliable back-end web applications using .NET and C#, as well as PHP, Java (or Kotlin or Scala), or Ruby
• Good front-end web skills with responsive design using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (including jQuery, Vue, Angular, React, etc.)
• Experience with databases such as …

Self-driving toy car using the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm

By Kamil Ciemniewski
August 29, 2018

The field of Reinforcement Learning has seen a lot of great improvement in the past years. Researchers at universities and companies like Deep Mind have been developing new and better ways to train intelligent, artificial agents to solve more and more difficult tasks. The algorithms being developed are requiring less time to train. They also are making the training much more stable.

This article is about an algorithm that’s one of the most cited lately: A3C — Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic.

As the subject is both wide and deep, I’m assuming the reader has the relevant background mastered already. Although reading it might be interesting even without understanding most of the notions in use, having a good grasp of them will help you get the most out of it.

Because we’re looking at the Deep Reinforcement Learning, the obvious requirement is to be acquainted with the neural networks. I’m also using different notions known in the field of Reinforcement Learning overall like $Q(a, s)$ and $V(s)$ functions or the n-step return. The mathematical expressions, in …