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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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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Building a Bluesky AI Sentiment Analysis Dashboard

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As the "Great Social Network Wars" carry on (my term, not anyone else), I’m finding myself more and more enjoying Bluesky. I do more posting on Mastodon, but Bluesky reminds me a lot more of early Twitter. Threads is… ok, but has felt too corporate. I can’t even remember the last time I checked it. Earlier this week, I was poking around the Bluesky API and was incredibly happy to discover that their Search API does not require a key and supports CORS, which means a simple client-side application could make use of it. In the past I had built similar tools for Twitter, back when it had a decent API, and I thought it might be fun to build something for Bluesky, specifically,... more →
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Building a General Purpose GeoJSON Viewer with Leaflet

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Last week I shared my initial experiences with Leaflet and I thought I’d share a small demo I built with it – a general purpose GeoJSON viewer. GeoJSON and Leaflet As I mentioned at the end of my last post, GeoJSON is a specification for encoding ad hoc geographic data. Here’s an example: { "type": "FeatureCollection", "features": [ { "type": "Feature", "id": 0, "properties": { "Code": "FRLA", "Name": "Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site" }, "geometry":... more →
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Building a CRUD Web App with Alpine.js

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One of the things I try to encourage here is for my readers to reach out with their questions. That rarely happens, but when it does, I try my best to answer as soon as possible. In this case, I got a great question from a reader back in May and then… life happened. Sorry, Nicholas, but hopefully this isn’t too late. His question was pretty simple – could I build an example of using Alpine.js for a CRUD interface? For folks who may not know the term, CRUD refers to: (C)reate (R)read (U)pdate (D)elete You’ve probably seen a hundred interfaces like this. You have a list of content with links to edit one, delete one, and a link to add a new instance of that content. When... more →
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Building a Web Version of Your Mastodon Archive with Eleventy

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A couple of days ago Fedi.Tips, an account that shares Mastodon tips, asked about how non-technical users could make use of their Mastodon archive. Mastodon makes this fairly easy (see this guide for more information), and spurred by that, I actually started work on a simple(ish) client-side application to support that. (You can see it here: https://tootviewer.netlify.app) This post isn’t about that, but rather, a look at how you can turn your archive into a web site using Eleventy. This is rather rough and ugly, but I figure it may help others. Here’s what I built. Start with a Fresh Eleventy Site # To begin, I just created a folder and npm installed Eleventy. I’m using the... more →
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Building a Chat Integration with Google Gemini

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It’s been on my queue to investigate how to use Generative AI in a ‘chat’ interface versus "one prompt and answer" mode for some time and today I finally got a chance to check it out. I’ll share my thoughts below, but once again I want to thank Allen Firstenberg for his help while I worked through some issues. As always, take what I’m sharing as the opinion of a developer still very new to this space. Any mistakes are my fault! What is GenAI chat? # Specifically, what is chat when it comes to generative AI? Nothing. Seriously. All ‘chat’ is taking your initial prompt, getting the result, then taking your next prompt and appending it. So for... more →
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Building a Generic RSS Parser Service with Cloudflare Workers

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About once every three months I’ll write a quick JavaScript demo and attempt to fetch someone’s RSS feed… and then remember that the vast majority of RSS feeds don’t specify a CORS header to allow remote scripts to load them. I know this – and yet I still tend to forget. I thought it would be kind of fun to build a serverless API via Cloudflare Workers to handle loading, parsing, and returning a RSS feed with CORS allowed. I figured this would be pretty easy, but I ran into a snag right away. Workers and NPM Modules # Cloudflare Workers is Node.js compatible… with some issues. Cloudflare has a documentation page on it addressing what you may run into, and for... more →
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