Serverless, with all the attendant ambiguity on what that means, tends to be discussed from the perspective of people who build services. This often leads to a focus on the differences between serverless and previous generations of infrastructure. Specifically, we talk about how the provisioning, balancing and so on have been made utility, as compute, storage, hardware and bandwidth had been in previous generations of technology.

Back in the dark ages I wrote a blog post on using Google Sign In to authorize a server from an Android client, and provided an accompanying gist with an example Activity in it. Recently, someone point out to me that gist was quite out of date, so I updated it to use the latest and greatest Google Sign In APIs on Android, with very pleasant results.

Very quick post on a problem I’ve seen a few people hit where they are upgrading a Firebase.com project which uses Google Sign In on Android.

The very first message sent over the precursor to the Internet was a log in attempt. Unfortunately, the system crashed part though, so the very first try was just “LO”. Since then, the explosion of networked systems has lead to an explosion systems to log in to.

The new Google Sign In SDK for iOS is out! With a new version number, and separated from the old Google+ SDK, the Sign-In SDK should make it easier and faster to implement Google Sign-In in your app. Lets take a look at how to use it from Swift.

Misconceptions about Google service accounts are at the heart of a number of problems I’ve seen developers having on Stack Overflow and various issue trackers. Hopefully this post will dispel some common misunderstandings, and break down what they are for.

Knowledge workers place a great deal of value in concentration and focus. Understanding systems and solving problems requires attention, leading to heated debates over the best kinds of noise cancelling headphones or whether it is really necessary to attend this or that meeting.

Recently I’ve been working on the samples for the Chromecast SDK on iOS. Since we’ve just updated the sample app for the brand new 2.4.0 SDK, I thought I’d briefly note down the changes I had to make, which should help if you need to update your own app from 2.3.0. As always, the full list of changes can be found in the release notes.

Very short post on a small feature that I know will be a popular one with some people! A regular feature request has been the ability to determine whether the profile picture with a Google+ profile is the default blue head or not. You can do that right now with the people.get API calls - and you can try it yourself from that page using the explorer.

The release today of version 1.7 of the Google+ iOS SDK added the ability to authorise both a client and server for access to Google APIs. This has been a feature for Android and Web based sign-ins for a while, and now is available across all three platforms. This should simplify server side code for people who have been building cross platform apps - for example if you need to retrieve profile information on the client, but retrieve circles on a server for a friend finding feature.