Links For You (10/25/25) / / No Comments Greetings, programs, and welcome to another links post. The weather is finally beginning to turn here which doesn’t necessarily mean cold weather, but days in the low 80s, mid 70s, which is an absolute relief from summer. Just in time for Halloween as well. Last year we unfortunately got rained out – this year it looks to be clear, and I can’t wait to walk with my kids (and yes, I’ll be in full costume myself). Here are some links for your reading enjoyment. Stay safe out there. On DevRel and the Unnatural Act Up first is a stellar post by Leon Adato, HOW TO DEVREL: The Most Un-Natural Act. In his post, he describes how he not only got people to stop by his company booth... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 10/25/25, links
Adding Generative Summaries with Chrome AI / / No Comments Earlier this year (sigh, when I had a job), I built a demo using Chrome’s built-in AI support to do something I thought was really interesting – progressively enhance product reviews to make it easier to see which were trending negative versus positive. It was a great example (imo!) of how AI support could enhance the experience in supported browsers without impacting the experience for others. That demo was on my mind this week, and it occurred to me that it would also be a great place to add summarization. The Summarizer API is now fully released, for Chrome that is, and does not need a flag enabled or anything like that. I’ve blogged about this API a few times already, most... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, Chrome, Generative, Summaries
Links For You (10/12/25) / / No Comments I blinked and somehow missed posting this a week or so ago. Time is, to quote the good Doctor, a bit wibbly wobbly. I’m currently watching a recording of the Saints/Patriots game and hoping we can follow last week’s win with another, but I’m not sure. Of course, the game’s been done for hours now but we’ve managed to miss the news so… we can still hope. Speaking of hope, as a reminder, I’m still looking for my next role, and if you know of a good developer evangelist/advocate position, please reach out! Alright, time for some links. When JSON Isn’t… First up is a great look at how JSON may not be as universally parsed/transferable/etc as you... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 10/12/25, links
Upcoming Speaking Engagements, and Code Break / / No Comments With full-time employment being a bit up in the air this year, I’ve not submitted to nearly as many conferences as I have in the past (but hey, my rejections are at an all-time low!), but I’ve actually got not one, but two upcoming talks this month. First up I’ll be giving an introduction to BoxLang to the Mid-Michigan CFUG user group on October 21st. You can find details here, https://mmcfug.org/. This meeting is 100% open to the public so if you’ve been curious about BoxLang from my posts here, you can get yourself a good intro later this month. Next, and this is somewhat new for me, but I’ll be giving a presentation on something near and dear to my heart, developer... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Break, code, Engagements, Speaking, Upcoming
BoxLang Quick Tips – Better Web Debugging / / No Comments Today’s BoxLang Quick Tip is incredibly quick, but also, really darn useful and something I had wished I knew earlier. The BoxLang MiniServer is a lightweight web server that you can use to test your web applications. I say lightweight but it’s gotten some really good improvements over the past few months, including flexible URL rewriting. Today I’m going to talk about something that’s going to be really useful to those of you who, like me, make mistakes from time to time. As with most of my BoxLang Quick Tips, you can skip to the video version at the bottom of the post. Let’s consider a BoxLang web application that consists of a grand total of one file: <bx:script>... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: better, BoxLang, Debugging, Quick, tips
I Know What You Did Last Summer (with val town) / / No Comments With Halloween a few weeks away, it’s officially spooky season. My wife and I usually plan our costumes months in advance (mine’s been ready since July or so) and we love decorating the house (and yard) with all kind of fun and darkly horrific decorations. Two years ago, I built a great Halloween-themed web app using Glitch and Cloudflare: I Know What You Did Last Summer (With Glitch and Cloudflare) Unfortunately, Glitch is no more. These things happen and I have to thank the Glitch folks for creating an incredibly cool resource and also helping people safely migrate off their platform. One of my projects was the Halloween project from two years ago. While the serverless function... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: know, last, summer, Town
Creating a GenAI Document Summarization Workflow in ColdFusion / / No Comments So this post comes from – I’m mostly sure – me forgetting to show a simple, but powerful demo at my presentation recently at the ColdFusion Summit. It’s nice and simple, but pretty darn useful so I decided to write a quick blog post about it and highlight the code. What’s a Document Workflow? Simply put, a document workflow is any process you would use to handle incoming documents. As an example, and one I’ve built many times over the past few years, you can use a workflow to convert all your incoming documents into PDF for easier handling. pdfRest has APIs for this and I’ll likely share a demo of them soon. (ColdFusion itself can convert HTML, PPTX,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: ColdFusion, creating, Document, GenAI, Summarization, Workflow
Building a Document Q&A System with Google Gemini / / No Comments Document summarization is a powerful and pretty darn useful feature of generative AI, but a proper "question and answer" system can really enable users to interact with a document. This is why you see various document viewing apps, like Acrobat, adding these features to their programs. I thought I’d take a look at building such a system via a simple web app to see how difficult it would be, and honestly, it wasn’t that bad. Having this in your own web app, versus an external vendor, gives you more control over the experience as well. Here’s what I built. The Stack The web app lets you drag and drop a PDF into the page, it then renders a preview of the PDF on the left... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, Document, Gemini, Google, system