Building Serverless Lambda Functions with BoxLang / / No Comments 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 → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, building, Functions, Lambda, Serverless
Introducing BoxLang – Scripting for the JVM / / No Comments 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 → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, Introducing, Scripting
3D Print Your World / / No Comments The Topography Explorer is an interactive map that generates and allows users to explore 3D renderings of the Earth’s surface.Using the application, you can create your own 3D visualizations of watershed areas or predefined regions. The animated GIF at the top of this post is an example of a 3D visualization generated by the Topography Explorer. This animation shows a 3D rendering of Bioko Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: print, World
Building a Resume Review and Revise System with Generative AI and Flask / / No Comments 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 → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, Flask, Generative, Resume, review, Revise, system
Godview AI / / No Comments Godview is one of the most promising new AI-powered maps to have emerged in the past 18 months. It is an interactive map that allows users to perform geographical searches using natural language queries.This week, Godview introduced an exciting new feature called “Discover.” This addition enhances the user experience by enabling individuals to click on any location on the map and instantly Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Godview
Links For You (2/8/25) / / No Comments 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 → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 2/8/25, links
Doing Evil Things with Generative AI and Recipes / / No Comments Let me preface this blog post with a very clear and direct message. Do not do what I did. This is a bad use of generative AI. This is pure silliness with no real practical value whatsoever. This is a really, really, bad idea. But it was fun as hell, so here goes. Last year I did two investigations into recipe parsing on the web. As we all know, most recipe sites go out of their way to make the actual recipe, you know, the thing you want to read, obfuscated and buried beneath a lot of stuff that is… well not the actual recipe. I first investigated JSON-LD and using that to parse web recipes into data: Scraping Recipes Using Node.js, Pipedream, and JSON-LD. This worked really well. I then... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Doing, Evil, Generative, Recipes, things
The Digital Twin’s Digital Twin / / No Comments The Punggol Digital DistrictThe Punggol Digital District (PDD) is a pioneering smart district under development in Singapore. Designed to be a hub for innovation, it will house major technology firms, fintech hubs of banks like OCBC and UOB, and will be seamlessly integrated with the newly opened Punggol Coast MRT station. What sets PDD apart from other smart districts is its Open Digital Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: digital, Twin, Twin's