A Test of Eleventy Fetch

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It has been quite some time since I wrote about Eleventy. My last post was a quick announcement about me upgrading my site to Eleventy 3.0 and how well that worked. I was going through my list of blog ideas and realized that in March of 2022, yes, 2022, I wrote down that I should take a quick look at Eleventy Fetch: I knew it worked, but I was curious about a few things, for example, invalidating the cache, but apparently this idea got buried and forgotten about until… today! So yes, it works, and works really well and if that’s all you care about, hit up the docs and you’re good to go. I had to see this for myself though. My API I began by creating a quick HTTP-based API... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , ,

Pixel Art via Vibe Coding

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I am 100% against the term "vibe coding". To be clear, my issue is with the name, it just strikes me as, well, horrible. That being said, I’ve been using gen AI to generate code samples over the past few months and it’s been incredibly interesting at times. It absolutely requires technical skill to evaluate the results and to help guide the AI when mistakes happen, but it’s been fun to give this a few tries recently. This morning I gave Claude’s desktop app a try and gave it what I thought was a non-trivial prompt: can you generate JavaScript code that will look at an image in the DOM and convert it to simplified pixel art? I then submitted the prompt and stood... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , ,

Adventures in Vibe Coding – Really, Really Big Numbers

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I continue to be really against the term ‘vibe coding’, but also continue to be fascinated by the idea of working with GenAI to help craft/enhance applications in an iterative, conversation-based manner. Ashley Willis recently released an incredibly well done post on the topic, "What Even Is Vibe Coding?", where she goes into detail on her take on the term and what it means for the industry. I think it is an excellent post and I want to highlight one part that really resonated with me: It scaffolds layouts, creates routes, fills in placeholder content, basically roughs out the shape of the thing I described. I still review it, refactor it, test it, and shape it into something... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , , , ,

A Sneak Peek at BoxLang’s Module Feature

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Last week I attended and spoke at Into the Box, a conference hosted by the Ortus folks, the company behind BoxLang. While there, I attended a talk from Brad Wood on how BoxLang’s module system works. I’ve been using modules with BoxLang since I first started playing with it. It’s how database support is added, mail, PDF, and more. You can see a list of currently released modules here. I had been curious as to how this works so I was excited for Brad’s presentation. While hearing him go over the details, I got even more excited, and literally built a ‘hello world’ module in a minute or so while he talked. I’m calling this blog post a "sneak peek"... more →
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Using AI to Analyze Chart Images

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I’ve done a few posts where I’ve asked GenAI services to analyze and summarize data. Most recently, I blogged about Chrome’s built-in AI APIs and summarizing raw data into simple English. In each case where I’ve done work like this, I’ve had access to the raw data of what I want the API to analyze. But what if you don’t? What if all you have is a simple chart image? I did some testing with this and here’s what I found. My Source Data For my source data, I created a set of charts using Highcharts. This isn’t my preferred front-end charting library, but I noticed their demos had (usually) a quick CSV export. That made it easy to get both a sample... more →
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Links For You (5/3/25)

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Happy Saturday, Happy Pre-May the 4th, and happy "I don’t have to beg for a job anymore". Yep, I’ve got a job. I’m going to be announcing where and what later this month when I start, but, finally, I can stop the hunt. Oh, and the crippling fear and despair being gone is an added bonus. So, happy day! Let’s get to the links. Tubes, tubes, tubes Last week I started off with a post from Todd Sharp so why not do it again? Todd wrote up his experience using Momento Topics API and Nixie Tubes. Nixie Tubs are beautiful steam punk looking tubes that can be connected to hardware and then changed programmatically. I did a bit of hardware hacking last year but the project... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: ,

Code Break Back for May

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Hey folks, after a break last month (for reasons), I’m happy to announce that Code Break is back on schedule. I’m ditching any further exploration of React for now, but instead turning my attention to something I think is really fun – building desktop apps. This first session will focus on a JavaScript-based framework while my next one will cover using Python. My next session will not be on a Tuesday, but Monday, May 5th, at 12PM CST. You can RSVP/sign up/etc here: https://cfe.dev/talkshows/codebreak-05052025/ I hope to see you there! Raymond Camden… more →
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Creating a PDF Book from Markdown with BoxLang

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Recently I’ve done some blog posts on BoxLang involving Markdown and PDFs, and I was curious if I could put together something that really demonstrated a complete tool of some sort. With that in mind, I built a "book" system where you can author pages in Markdown and use a BoxLang CLI script to generate a resulting PDF. It’s more a POC than a real app, but it was pretty fun to build. Here’s what I did. Functionality At a high level, the book is created from a source of Markdown files. Each Markdown file can use front matter (data on top) to define variables that are evaluated at the time the book is created. You can also use a "global" data file to define... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , , , ,
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