Code Break this Thursday – Ray Finally Learns React / / No Comments Ok, so if you attended my last Code Break session you know I was hinting that I was really excited for my next one. For years now I’ve wanted to give React a fair shake and actually try to build something with it. Finally I’m making time to do so. This Thursday at 12PM CST, my next session will be: I Don’t like React. Let’s Learn React! To be clear, it isn’t that I dislike React, it’s just that every time I’ve looked at the code, it just didn’t gel with me. I know it’s incredibly popular, but I always felt like if I needed to build a proper "web app", I’d just use Vue (despite my feelings about Vue 3, feel free to ask me in... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Break, code, Finally, Learns, React, this, Thursday
Parsing Uploaded Resumes into Form Fields with Google Gemini / / No Comments As I’ve recently become somewhat familiar with job application sites (sigh, thanks Adobe), I’ve noticed an interesting feature some sites use. After selecting your resume to upload, they will parse the resume and either offer to, or automatically, fill in some of the form fields of the application for you. I thought it would be interesting to try this myself making use of Google’s Gemini APIs. Here’s what I discovered. The Test Script As always, I began with a script that would take a hard-coded resume and attempt to parse it. For the most part, this is basic "upload a file and ask the AI to talk about", but in my case, I wanted a very particular set of data... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Fields, form, Gemini, Google, into, Parsing, Resumes, Uploaded
Quick Demo of Chrome’s Summarization GenAI (Upcoming) API / / No Comments I’ve blogged a few times recently about Google’s AI on Chrome initiative to bring AI features to the browser itself. Yesterday, my Code Break episode was specifically on this topic: Play Video In that session, I talk specifically about the Summarizer API, which does… wait for it… summarization. (It also covers the Writer and Rewriter API which I covered… woah, way back in September of last year: "Using Chrome AI to Rewrite Text") One interesting aspect of the API is that it offers multiple types of summarization: key points (the default) tl;dr teaser headline You can also request three different lengths: short medium (default) long According... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Chrome's, Demo, GenAI, Quick, Summarization, Upcoming
Using AI in the Browser for Typo Rewriting / / No Comments Last week I gave a presentation on Chrome’s new built-in AI support (I’ll link the video at the end) and it’s gotten me inspired to consider new and different ways these APIs can be used to enhance the user experience. These APIs still aren’t quite ready for production use, and it’s absolutely possible we may never see these in Safari or Firefox, but the possibility of using them to enhance an application where available is exciting. For today, I want to share an interesting use case that occurred to me a few weeks ago. One of the APIs being built is a translation API (along with a language detection) API as well. In general the idea here is to go from one language... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: browser, Rewriting, Typo, using
Using Java Libraries in BoxLang / / No Comments One of the aspects that makes BoxLang compelling is that it runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine which means you get access to any Java library out there. This is something ColdFusion has as well and in the past, I’ve integrated Java libraries into my web apps to make use of open source from the Java community. Best of all, you don’t really need any Java knowledge to do this. Typically libraries will provide good docs and and examples and the mental model of translating a Java example to BoxLang’s language is fairly simple. A few days ago, I blogged an example of parallel processing in BoxLang and in one of the samples, I did a tiny bit of RSS feed processing. I mentioned... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, Java, libraries, using
Using Parallel Looping in BoxLang / / No Comments Last week I wrote about converting a Python file search script to BoxLang. In that post (and the original Python version) I mentioned how the utility wasn’t terribly efficient as it needed to recreate an index every time it ran. Despite this, the performance was pretty good, taking about two seconds or so to generate the file index from near seven thousand Markdown files. Right after I shared that post, Luis Majano shared an interesting performance tweak I had missed. In BoxLang (and to be fair, this is a feature both Lucee and ColdFusion have as well), when you loop over arrays, structures, and queries, you can enable parallel execution by simply adding an additional argument to the loop.... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, Looping, Parallel, using
Links For You (2/22/25) / / No Comments Happy Link Day… oh wait, that isn’t a thing? Well, let’s pretend it is. Those of us in Louisiana are in Mardi Gras season with the holiday itself coming up on March 4th. If the weather holds out, we’ll be outside catching beads and listening to marching bands. It can be a lot of fun if it doesn’t get rained out. It’s also a great chance to eat some really bad (for you but yummy) food. I’ll share a pic or two on the next edition of this post. Ok, on with the links! Introducing AX (Agent Experience) Mathias Biilmann (CEO at Netlify, they host this blog), wrote up an introduction to the idea of AX, or "agent experience". His post describes AX as... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 2/22/25, links
Building a File Search Script in BoxLang / / No Comments My initial blog post on BoxLang used a simple script example to demonstrate how the language can be used to build shell script type utilities and it got me thinking about other ways I could use BoxLang for my own personal tools. A little over three years ago, I blogged about a Python script I built to perform searches, locally, against my blog. My blog content comes from near seven thousand Markdown files and while I’ve got a good client-side search feature, I was curious what I could from the terminal. That script did two things: Index each of the thousands of Markdown files by reading in the content and parsing the filename into a date and path value Taking search input and checking... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, building, file, Script, search