Pairing: Natasha Romanoff x Fem!Reader

Warnings: cussing, sexual suggestion, that’s all!

A/N: hello! hope you guys like this! happy reading <3

anon requested: Hi Kass! Could I request a super fluffy clingy Nat that’s trying to take her girlfriend shopping for video games and completely geeks out about like collectibles, games and other stuff? If you’re okay with it of course.

Summary: Y/N supports Natasha’s gaming addiction, despite not being a gamer herself.

Word Count: 1.5K

| masterlist | request rules/guidelines | wips |

please do not repost or try and take ownership of my work. reblogs, likes, and comments are always welcome. <3

Mobile phones are used by 5.22 billion people, while 4.66 billion people have access to the internet. The rush to develop innovative apps based on new concepts is greater than ever. Businesses of all sizes have set aside funds to develop the most relevant mobile applications to meet the demands and preferences of their consumers. React Native and Xamarin are presently dominating the scene, according to those who monitor the mobile app development industry's trends.

The developer community prefers both of these open source cross-platform frameworks for developing high-performing apps with minimal coding effort and time. Several businesses have made it a prerequisite to hire mobile app developers who know how to write code that works on both iOS and Android. It's no surprise that these frameworks have become quite popular.

When asked which of these two titans has the upper hand in the sector, however, individuals rarely have an answer. Both React Native and Xamarin have their own set of benefits and drawbacks, making it tough to choose between the two.

Today, we'll go over some major aspects that highlight the differences between React Native and Xamarin. But before that, let’s look at their individual characteristics. Let’s go

What is Xamarin?

Xamarin is an open-source platform for .NET developers, similar to React Native. The fundamental purpose of Xamarin is to keep shared code and platform code in communication. The ability of Xamarin to enhance the capabilities of the .NET developer platform with platform-independent tools and frameworks distinguishes it as a unique framework for app development.

Furthermore, Xamarin may take advantage of the entire functionality of the underlying platform. This means that when the app runs on Android, it will take advantage of platform-specific features to deliver the desired user experience. The same can be said for an app that runs on iOS devices. Its ability to take use of the hardware acceleration capabilities of the underlying platform is also due to Xamarin's ability to offer the necessary performance.

Benefits:

Below are some of the benefits of Xamarin:

Xamarin is an ecosystem of built-in technology that enables Xamarin developers to create cross-platform apps in a single step. Developers may reuse 96 percent of this code when using the C# language and the .NET framework. Building apps for all platforms necessitates the use of three technologies: C#, .NET, and Visual Studio.

Xamarin applications are designed to operate on a variety of platforms, yet they share a similar code base. Aside from that, their business logic, database access, and network connectivity are all the same. The developer's only responsibilities are to make improvements to the user interface. This is necessary to ensure that each platform retains its original feel and appearance. In the development world, Xamarin is recognized for providing a highly native but simple application performance. Xamarin has unrivalled performance as compared to other cross-platform programming tools. The picture loading performance of a native platform is just 14 percent quicker than Xamarin when compared to native application development and rendering.

Using Xamarin, you can create a fantastic user experience. It's a collection of standardized interface components and pieces with 100% reuse code. Developers may utilize the built-in Xamarin to change the components from either  Xamarin or iOS or Xamarin. Android to make the needed modifications.

Even for the most popular components, Xamarin did not have a large number of libraries available to developers initially. However, Microsoft's development team heeded this request and created ready-to-use components for typical scenarios and use cases.

Having read about Xamarin and it’s benefits, let’s see what React Native has to offer us.

What is React Native?

React Native is an open-source framework built and introduced by Facebook in 2015. It is based on JavaScript and JSX. The goal is to create native apps for both iOS and Android devices.

The React Native framework uses JSX, which is an amalgamation of XML-Esque Markup. React renders to the native platform of the device on which the app is executing.

This ensures that the app performs similar to those created with a native app development framework such as Java for Android or Objective-C for iOS. As they have a common code base, React Native mobile app development enables the creation of platform-specific versions of components that can be shared across platforms. React Native is used to create mobile apps such as Facebook, Walmart, Bloomberg, and Instagram.

Benefits:

Following are some of the benefits of React Native:

Developers built React Native, and they continue to support it with the same zeal. For this incredible community support, there has been a revolution in React Native mobile app development. The community generously distributes its vast expertise, and everyone gets free access to a plethora of free components for mobile app creation.

With live and hot reloading, React Native mobile app development improves itself. Both of these qualities are complementary, yet there is a significant difference between them. The framework can compile and read the changes performed by the developer in real time thanks to live reloading. When sending a new file to the simulator, the complete file is read from the beginning and the changes are updated. The goal of hot reloading is to test the application's modifications without actually reloading it.

React Native is the go-to solution for developers looking to save money because 90% of the code can be reused to build iOS and Android apps. Working with React Native saves a lot of time because it just requires small changes to add nativity and minor changes to create performant applications.

The React Native application developers may render the application for third-party support using the JavaScript-powered framework. Because React Native does not have all of its components in one place, it makes use of native and JavaScript modules to improve the application's functionality. Third-party modules may be used to integrate features like maps and two-factor authentication to the app.

The frameworks chosen to develop an application have a direct impact on its performance and capacity to deliver a better client experience. As React Native makes use of native modules and components to assist developers in creating a working application, it is possible to generate code for native APIs without causing any issues. As a result, performance-centric apps may be developed at reduced costs and in record time.

Now that we have some in-depth information about the two platforms, let’s do a comparative study between the two to help web developers choose the right platform.

Xamarin Vs React Native:

Direct comparisons are usually the most effective approach to choose between two options. Let’s have a look.

Performance: This area is critical to your ultimate selection because cross-platform and hybrid frameworks are renowned for sacrificing performance for convenience. Though both Xamarin and React Native provide near-native performance, Xamarin is faster on Android and iOS and provides a UI for utilizing native tools.

Popularity: Although popularity does not necessarily define the worth of software, it does have a significant impact on how other people engage with it. The popularity of the software is frequently associated with characteristics like a big skill pool, thorough tooling, and a vibrant community. React Native is more popular than Xamarin, maybe because it is open-source whereas Xamarin is closed-source and exclusively supported by Microsoft. This is evident in everything from Stack Overflow insights to Google Trends.

Community And Developer Ecosystem: You may expect React Native to have a larger and more supportive community than Xamarin for the same reasons mentioned above. React Native's community was small when it first started. However, as the framework develops in popularity and JavaScript frameworks in general gain in popularity, spotting other React Native developers has gotten simpler and easier.

Development Environment: Pre-built components are available in both Xamarin and React Native to improve speed and the developer experience. Despite the live reload functionality of React Native, the technology as a whole pales in contrast to Xamarin. Xamarin. Forms and  Xamarin.iOS as well as Xamarin.Android  gives developers the ability to design native UI components that are particular to the platform. Xamarin developers may get native-like performance in this method, which React Native developers may not be able to do.

Availability: The majority of open-source frameworks are free to use. Xamarin, on the other hand, is unable to claim that title. There is a free version of Xamarin, however it has restricted functionality. In general, more access equals more freedom, therefore React Native has the upper hand in this category.

Compilation: Just-in-time (JIT) compilation is used by JavaScript and its frameworks, notably React Native. Despite the fact that compiled languages are quicker than interpreted languages because they are translated to machine code before execution, JIT compilation may offer the best of both worlds. JIT compilation is used by JavaScript, Java, and C#. However, React Native's JIT compilation only works on Android, not iOS, causing performance issues for iOS apps. Both JIT and ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation are available in C#. In most situations, AOT compiled code runs quicker. Xamarin vs. React Native demonstrates that both frameworks have identical compilation techniques, but Xamarin has a compiler that works well on both iOS and Android.

Expense: Xamarin and React Native are both free to download. However, Xamarin is only available for free to individuals and small businesses. This, of course, makes React Native, which is completely free, much more enticing.

Wrap Up:

In Hinduism, the goddess Durga, also known as Shakti or Devi, is the protective mother of the universe. She is one of the faith's most popular deities, a protector of all that is good and harmonious in the world. Sitting astride a lion or tiger, the multi-limbed Durga battles the forces of evil in the world.

Durga's Name and Its Meaning

In Sanskrit, Durga means "a fort" or "a place that is difficult to overrun," an apt metaphor for this deity's protective, militant nature. Durga is sometimes referred to as Durgatinashini, which literally translates into "the one who eliminates sufferings."

Her Many Forms

In Hinduism, the major gods and goddesses have multiple incarnations, meaning they can appear on earth as any number of other deities. Durga is no different; among her many avatars are Kali, Bhagvati, Bhavani, Ambika, Lalita, Gauri, Kandalini, Java, and Rajeswari.

When Durga appears as herself, she manifests in one of nine appellations or forms: Skondamata, Kusumanda, Shailaputri, Kaalratri, Brahmacharini, Maha Gauri, Katyayani, Chandraghanta, and Siddhidatri. Collectively known as the Navadurga, each of these deities have their own holidays in the Hindu calendar and special prayers and songs of praise.

Durga's Appearance

Befitting her role as mother protector, Durga is multi-limbed so that she may always be ready to battle evil from any direction. In most depictions, she has between eight and 18 arms and holds a symbolic object in each hand.

Like her consort Shiva, the goddess Durga is also referred to as Triyambake (the three-eyed goddess). Her left eye represents desire, symbolized by the moon; her right eye represents action, symbolized by the sun; and her middle eye stands for knowledge, symbolized by fire.

Her Weaponry

Durga carries a variety of weapons and other items that she uses in her fight against evil. Each has a symbolic meaning important to Hinduism; these are the most significant:

The conch shell symbolizes the Pranava or the mystic word Om, which indicates her holding on to God in the form of sound.

The bow and arrows represent energy. By holding the bow and arrows both in one hand, Durga demonstrates her control over both aspects of energy—potential and kinetic.

The thunderbolt signifies firmness in one's convictions. Just as a real bolt of lightning can destroy anything it strikes, Durga reminds Hindus to attack a challenge without losing confidence.

The lotus in Durga's hand, not yet fully in bloom, represents the certainty of success but not finality. The lotus in Sanskrit is called Pankaj, which means "born of mud," reminding the faithful to stay true to their spiritual quest amid the worldly mud of lust and greed.

The Sudarshan-Chakra or beautiful discus, which spins around the index finger of the Goddess, signifies that the entire world is subservient to the will of Durga and is at her command. She uses this unfailing weapon to destroy evil and produce an environment conducive to the growth of righteousness.

The sword that Durga holds in one of her hands symbolizes knowledge, which has the sharpness of a sword. Knowledge free from all doubts is symbolized by the shine of the sword.

The trident or Trishul is a symbol of three qualities: Satwa (inactivity), Rajas (activity), and Tamas (nonactivity). Deva uses these to alleviate physical, mental, and spiritual suffering.

Durga's Transport

In Hindu art and iconography, Durga is frequently depicted standing atop or riding a tiger or lion, which represents power, will, and determination. In riding this fearsome beast, Durga symbolizes her mastery over all these qualities. Her bold pose is called Abhay Mudra, which means "freedom from fear." Just as the mother goddess confronts evil without fear, Hindu scripture teaches, so too should Hindu faithful conduct themselves in a righteous, courageous way.

Holidays

No.. definitely. I’m definitely the crazy one and it’s exhausting. 

Java Bear and I had a long talk about where he was and what had been going on with him all week. He totally validated my feelings and apologized for not reaching out sooner. He continues to reinforce how good he actually is at communication and clearly stated that if there is ever any doubt in my mind of my importance in his life that I should look at my keychain. Giving me a key to the house really IS a big thing. 

He also said that if I’m not sure about what’s going on with him or am afraid that he may be shutting down on me that I should always just reach out and let him know what I’m feeling... and if I’m not able to do that, that I can and should talk to Olive about it. The GF/metamour line is a touchy one, but she’s continued to show support for the communication between us about Java Bear. 

This weekend was more of that validation of my place in their life and just how much they care about me.

By Peter Welch, Senior Principal Engineer

Today, Yahoo Mail introduced a feature that allows you to automatically sync your mobile photos to Yahoo Mail so that they’re readily available when you’re composing an email from your computer. A key technology behind this feature is a new photo and video platform called “Tripod,” which was born out of the innovations and capabilities of Flickr.

For 13 years, Flickr has served as one of the world’s largest photo-sharing communities and as a platform for millions of people who have collectively uploaded more than 13 billion photos globally. Tripod provides a great opportunity to bring some of the most-loved and useful Flickr features to the Yahoo network of products, including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, and Yahoo Answers Now.

Tripod and its Three Services

As the name suggests, Tripod offers three services:

The Pixel Service: for uploading, storing, resizing, editing, and serving photos and videos.

The Enrichment Service: for enriching media metadata using image recognition algorithms. For example, the algorithms might identify and tag scenes, actions, and objects.

The Aggregation Service: for in-application and cross-application metadata aggregation, filtering, and search.

The combination of these three services makes Tripod an end-to-end platform for smart image services. There is also an administrative console for configuring the integration of an application with Tripod, and an identity service for authentication and authorization.

Figure 1: Tripod Architecture

The Pixel Service

Flickr has achieved a highly-scalable photo upload and resizing pipeline. Particularly in the case of large-scale ingestion of thousands of photos and videos, Flickr’s mobile and API teams tuned techniques, like resumable upload and deduplication, to create a high-quality photo-sync experience. On serving, Flickr tackled the challenge of optimizing storage without impacting photo quality, and added dynamic resizing to support more diverse client photo layouts.

Over many years at Flickr, we’ve demonstrated sustained uploads of more than 500 photos per second. The full pipeline includes the PHP Upload API endpoint, backend Java services (Image Daemon, Storage Master), hot-hot uploads across the US West and East Coasts, and five worldwide photo caches, plus a massive CDN.

In Tripod’s Pixel Service, we leverage all of this core technology infrastructure as-is, except for the API endpoint, which is now written in Java and implements a new bucket-based data model.

The Enrichment Service

In 2013, Flickr made an exciting leap. Yahoo acquired two Computer Vision technology companies, IQ Engines and LookFlow, and rolled these incredible teams into Flickr. Using their image recognition algorithms, we enhanced Flickr Search and introduced Magic View to the Flickr Camera Roll.

In Tripod, the Enrichment Service applies the image recognition technology to each photograph, resulting in rich metadata that can be used to enhance filtering, indexing, and searching. The Enrichment Service can identify places, themes, landmarks, objects, colors, text, media similarity, NSFW content, and best thumbnail. It also performs OCR text recognition and applies an aesthetic score to indicate the overall quality of the photograph.

The Aggregation Service

The Aggregation Service lets an application, such as Yahoo Mail, find media based on any criteria. For example, it can return all the photos belonging to a particular person within a particular application, all public photos, or all photos belonging to a particular person taken in a specific location during a specific time period (e.g. San Francisco between March 1, 2015 and May 31, 2015.)

Vespa, Yahoo’s internal search engine, indexes all metadata for each media item. If the Enrichment Service has been run on the media, the metadata is indexed in Vespa and is available to the Aggregation API. The result set from a call to the Aggregation Service depends on authentication and the read permissions defined by an API key.

APIs and SDKs

Each service is expressed as a set of APIs. We upgraded our API technology stack, switching from PHP to Spring MVC on a Java Jetty servlet container, and made use of the latest Spring features such as Spring Data, Spring Boot, and Spring Security with OAuth 2.0. Tripod’s API is defined and documented using Swagger. Each service is developed and deployed semi-autonomously from a separate Git repository with a separate build lifecycle to an independent micro-service container.

Figure 2: Tripod API

Swagger Editor makes it easy to auto-generate SDKs in many languages, depending on the needs of Yahoo product developers. The mobile SDKs for iOS and Android are most commonly used, as is the JS SDK for Yahoo’s web developers. The SDKs make integration with Tripod by a web or mobile application easy. For example, in the case of the Yahoo Mail photo upload feature, the Yahoo Mail mobile app includes the embedded Tripod SDK to manage the photo upload process.

Buckets and API Keys

The Tripod data model differs in some important ways from the Flickr data model. Tripod applications, buckets, and API keys introduce the notion of multi-tenancy, with a strong access control boundary. An application is simply the name of the application that is using Tripod (e.g. Yahoo Mail). Buckets are logical containers for the application’s media, and media in an application is further affected by bucket settings such as compression rate, capacity, media time-to-live, and the selection of enrichments to compute.

Figure 3: Creating a new Bucket

Beyond Tripod’s generic attributes, a bucket may also have custom organizing attributes that are defined by an application’s developers. API keys control read/write permissions on buckets and are used to generate OAuth tokens for anonymous or user-authenticated access to a bucket.

Figure 4: Creating a new API Key

App developers at Yahoo use the Tripod Console to:

Create the buckets and API keys that they will use with their application

Define the bucket settings and the access control rules for each API key

Another departure from the Flickr API is that Tripod can handle media that is not user-generated content (UGC). This is critical for storing curated content, as is required by many Yahoo applications.

Architecture and Implementation

Going from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture has had its challenges. In particular, we’ve had to find the right internal communication process between the services. At the core of this is our Pulsar Event Bus, over which we send Avro messages backed by a strong schema registry. This lets each Tripod team move fast, without introducing incompatible changes that would break another Tripod service.

For data persistence, we’ve moved most of our high-scale multi-colo data to Yahoo’s distributed noSQL database. We’ve been experimenting with using Redis Cluster as our caching tier, and we use Vespa to drive the Aggregation service. For Enrichment, we make extensive use of Storm and HBase for real-time processing of Tripod’s Computer Vision algorithms. Finally, we run large backfills using PIG, Oozie, and Hive on Yahoo’s massive grid infrastructure.

In 2017, we expect Tripod will be at 50% of Flickr’s scale, with Tripod supporting the photo and video needs across many Yahoo applications that serve Yahoo’s 1B users across mobile and desktop.

After reading about Tripod, you might have a few questions

Did Tripod replace Flickr?!

No! Flickr is still here, better than ever. In fact, Flickr celebrated its 13th birthday last week! Over the past several years, the Flickr team has implemented significant innovations on core photo management features (such as an optimized storage footprint, dynamic resizing, Camera Roll, Magic View, and Search). We wanted to make these technology advancements available to other teams at Yahoo!

But, what about the Flickr API? Why not just use that?

Flickr APIs are being used by hundreds of thousands of third-party developers around the world. Flickr’s API was designed for interacting with Flickr Accounts, Photos, and Groups, generally on lower scale than the Flickr site itself; it was not designed for independent, highly configurable, multi-tenant core photo management at large scale.

How can I join the team?

Learn Java Programming for Beginners Day -1

What is Java ?

The below words describes java in a better way :

general purpose

object oriented

class based

platform independent

modern programming language. It is designed in the early 1990s by Sun Microsystems but currently owned by Oracle.

Describe why Java is a general purpose programming language ?

Since 2000s, Java is a highly popular programming language till today. It is used for…