My First (and Last) Spotify Web App – Music Snob / / No Comments I’ve been a happy Spotify user for a few years now (I transitioned from Amazon Music after they cut features and generally ticked me off) and as I listen to music a lot, I’ve built a few integrations with their APIs over the years. Those integrations were simple tools that hit my own personal data and were just for fun, but I thought I’d take a crack at building a simple app with their Web API which would allow Spotify users to authenticate and see their own data. I built the app. But I 100% would not recommend working with the Spotify APIs going further. I’ll explain everything that went wrong, why I recommend this and so forth, but if you just want to see the app, scroll... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: first, last, Music, Snob, Spotify
Come Learn about BoxLang at Into the Box 2025 / / No Comments Later this month, I’ll be speaking at Into the Box 2025 in Washington, DC and online. I’ve spoken at Into the Box in the past and the Ortus team puts on a great show, so I’d absolutely suggest checking it out if you can. In person tickets are available, although close to selling out. The virtual event gives you everything the in person event does minus the workshops. What will I be speaking about? BoxLang of course! I’ll be giving an introductory session on the language and talking about how you can start using it today. I promise multiple, enterprise-worthy cat demos to go along with it! Come join me and many others! Raymond Camden… more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 2025, about, BoxLang, Come, into, Learn
Scheduling Code in BoxLang / / No Comments While I was busy getting utterly overwhelmed by deep AI talks at Arc of AI this week, BoxLang released it’s third release candidate, and while there’s multiple goodies in there, the schedular is the one that interests me the most. Currently the only docs are in the release notes, but there’s enough information there to get started. Here’s a quick look at what’s been added. First off – just in case it isn’t obvious, the idea here is to write code that can execute by itself on some predefined schedule. There’s multiple different use cases for this – performing backups, refreshing data from an API, logging stats and so forth. In BoxLang, scheduled... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, code, Scheduling
Links For You (4/5/25) / / No Comments Not going to lie, this has been a long week. I gave two presentations at Arc of AI, one of which needed to big updates as Chrome changed their API a day before my presentation. To be fair, the browser AI stuff is in development and the changes were good, but I had to scramble a bit. I’m exhausted (for this and other reasons) so let’s just skip right to the links, shall we? Search with Video and Algolia A few days ago, Algolia had a small virtual developer conference with one of the most fascinating presentations I’ve seen. Tim Carry described how he built a tool to index and search short videos from YouTube. The number of different tools and things he did to build this little... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 4/5/25, links
Watch me suffer with React more in tomorrow’s Code Break! / / No Comments So my last Code Break was… painful. My experience trying to learn React did not go well. Because of that I thought strongly about giving up, but what fun would that be? Join me tomorrow (March 18th) at 12PM CST where I’ll, once again, try to learn some basic React features and get a trivial web site built. Will I make it? Probably not! But you can come join me and cheer/heckle me on! I hope to see you there: https://cfe.dev/talkshows/codebreak-03182025/ Raymond Camden… more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Break, code, More, React, suffer, tomorrow's, Watch
Creating Images with Generative AI via Conversation / / No Comments Last week, I blogged about updates to Google’s Gemini APIs in regards to image generation. That post detailed how there are now two models for generating images with the experimental Gemini Flash model having a nice free tier. One of the interesting features of the API is the ability to edit existing images, in other words, pass an image to Gemini and via a prompt, have Gemini update it. I thought it would be kind of fun to see if I could build a ‘chat’ interface for this model, one where you could simply talk to Gemini and have it work on your image along with you. Now to be clear, this is no different than what you can do now at the Gemini website, but I figured it would give... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Conversation, creating, Generative, images
BoxLang Quick Tips – Sending Email / / No Comments Welcome to another BoxLang Quick Tip! As with my other quick tips, I’ll end this blog post with a link to the video version so feel free to skip down to it, or read, or both if you prefer! Today’s quick tip is a look at how BoxLang supports sending email, and as with my previous tips, an additional module is all you need to do. The Mail module can be installed via the CLI like so: install-bx-module bx-mail. Once installed, you get three new components for your runtime: mail – This is the core component and handles all mail operations. You’ll always use this. It has quite a few options so be sure to check the docs, but in general you’ll provide the to, from, subject,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, email, Quick, Sending, tips
Geolocating a Folder of Images with Python / / No Comments I’m not sure how useful this will be, but as I recently built it in another language (I plan on blogging that soon as well), I thought I’d take a stab at building it in Python. Given a folder of images, can I use Python to grab the Exif information and then using that, figure out where the photos were taken using a reverse geocoding service? Here’s what I built. First – Get the Images Ok, the first step is simple, just get a list of images from a directory: INPUT = "./sources" files = os.listdir(INPUT) for file in files: print(file) Woot! I’m a Python Master! Get the Exif info For the next step, I knew I needed to get the Exif info. For that I used... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Folder, Geolocating, images, Python