Links For You (2/22/25)

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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 →
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Building a File Search Script in BoxLang

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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 →
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Building a Web App with BoxLang

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I’ve been building web apps for thirty years now, which frankly is kind of scary to see explicitly spelled out. For a large chunk of that time I built web apps using an application server, ColdFusion, where my templates would dynamically output HTML (or other formats like JSON) to return to the browser. For my non-ColdFusion readers out there, you can just replace ColdFusion with PHP or ASP and you get the basic idea. Most recently, I’ve spent a lot less time on the server and more on the front-end, but I kept coming back from time to time. Earlier this year I looked at building a simple blog in the Python-based Flask framework. I thought it would be a good exercise to try something... more →
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Using Intl.DurationFormat for Localized Durations

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Last year I had the opportunity to give a talk on the web platform’s Intl specification. This made me incredibly happy because in preparing for the presentation, I discovered so many cool features and capabilities of the spec that I had no idea existed. Almost a year ago, I wrote up a blog post on Intl.RelativeTimeFormat, talking about how the API was easy to use, but perhaps a bit difficult when dealing when determining the best values to use when formatting dynamic dates. Today, I’m going to turn my attention to a related spec, Intl.DurationFormat The Basics The DurationFormat API works like so: Given a locale (defaulting to the browser’s locale) Given a set of values representing... more →
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Building Serverless Lambda Functions with BoxLang

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I’ve been a fan of serverless for quite some time. My introduction to it was OpenWhisk, way back in 2016. It’s been appealing to me for a long time as an easy way to deploy lightweight services quickly. As much as I’ve been a fan of the technology, I’ve yet to really embrace Amazon’s Lambda product. I’ve played with it a bit off and on in the past, but it always felt incredibly overwhelming. Netlify Functions, Pipedream, and Cloudflare Workers have been my main tools for serverless just because of how simple they are. That being said, the last few days I’ve been playing with BoxLang on AWS and thought I’d share my experience. The Basics So let’s... more →
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Introducing BoxLang – Scripting for the JVM

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The last week or so I’ve been playing with a new language, which honestly is one of the most fun things I get to do. BoxLang is a dynamic scripting language that runs on the JVM although you don’t really need to know a thing about Java to make use of it. It’s currently in beta and moving towards an official 1.0 release, but you can absolutely kick the tires on it now (as I have!) and I thought I’d share a bit about what I’m doing with it. BoxLang is open source and free, with the company behind it, Ortus Solutions, offering professional services on top. If you come from the ColdFusion world, you know Ortus has been around a while and has created a huge amount of... more →
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Building a Resume Review and Revise System with Generative AI and Flask

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The last two sessions of my live stream, Code Break, have been really interesting, at least to me anyway. I’ve been discussing generative AI with Google Gemini and building a relatively simple example while doing so – a resume review and revisement system. This started off pretty simply with a Python script and then iterated into a proper Flask app. I thought it would be fun to document the code here a bit and share it with those who couldn’t make the streams. If you would rather just watch the recordings, I’ve got them embedded at the bottom. Feel free to skip to that. Step One – The Script For my first iteration, I built a simple Python script that: Uploaded the... more →
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Links For You (2/8/25)

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In my last Links For You post, there was snow outside from a completely unusual snow storm down here in Louisiana. Two weeks later, my AC is running and I’m near back to wearing shorts again. Sigh. I’ve said it before and will say it again, I cannot wait to get out of the south. With those complaints out of the way, let’s get to the links! Python Tips As I’ve made it a mission this year to get Somewhat Good at Python, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for good Python tips and tutorials. I’ve subscribed to, and recommend, the Python Weekly newsletter, where I found this great video embedded below. ArjanCodes covers ten good tips for new Python developers, and I’m... more →
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