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One OpenWhisk Action Calls Another
24 February 2017
Read moreWorking with openwhisk, it's easy to create many isolated actions and build them up into sequences; the output of one action is passed to the next action in the sequence. In my case, I wanted one action to spawn potentially many other actions. I had to look up how to do it and here it is so I can look it up more quickly next time!
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Alexa Project Name Generator on OpenWhisk
22 February 2017
Read moreI'm having lots of fun with my Amazon echo and echo dots, creating skills for them. Initially I used Amazon's lambda platform since that's a very easy way to get started - but I'm an advocate for IBM and was looking for an excuse to play with OpenWhisk (an open source serverless offering that Bluemix has a hosted version of) anyway so this was a great opportunity!
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Working With Sorted Sets in Redis
09 February 2017
Read moreI work with a bunch of datastores and I probably shouldn't have favourites - but if I did, Redis would be one of them! I used the sorted sets in something I was building and remembered how much I liked the feature so here's a quick primer on what it is and when it can be handy.
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One-Line Command For Newest OpenWhisk Logs
01 February 2017
Read moreOne of my current project uses OpenWhisk, which is an open source serverless technology stack. IBM has it on their Bluemix platform, and since I work there, I get to play with it as much as I like! One thing that did seem clunky is that it takes more than …
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Exclude a Directory when Grepping
26 January 2017
Read moreAs a developer-of-another-discipline who is now transitioning into a bunch of NodeJS projects, I grep a LOT. However I am usually only interested in the code in the project at hand, and not the dependencies - of course grep has a switch for that! To grep your project and not the …
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Sewing Machine Cover
25 January 2017
Read moreI don't blog about craft projects all that often, if you have this post in your feed and didn't want it, then try my "tech" feed specifically rather than all of the blog posts (recommended as I will be blogging a few non-tech things in the coming months). Anyway, I love to make things, code or otherwise, and since I'm not travelling a lot at the moment, I have time to make things AND to write about them. Today: my new sewing machine cover!
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Amazon Lambda Deployment Workflow For Alexa Skill
23 January 2017
Read moreI mentioned in my post about creating a new skill for Alexa that I found the workflow quite clunky. Having tried a bit more and bugged a few people to find out how they hadn't killed anyone trying to develop with a workflow like this, I have some tips to share!
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cfenv for Easier NodeJS on Cloud Foundry
19 January 2017
Read moreNow I'm working at IBM I am making extensive use of their Bluemix Platform, which is based on Cloud Foundry. The way that Cloud Foundry is set up is actually very neat, with everything you need contained in JSON structures within environment variables. Parsing out those values can be a pain however, so I thought I'd share the library that's helping me the most with this: cfenv.
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Using NPM Link to Develop Dependent Projects
12 January 2017
Read moreRight now I'm working on a javascript project that relies on another module for some of its functionality. I'm making fairly major changes that affect both projects, and since the dependency is pulled in via npm, initially I was committing and pushing to a repo so that npm could pull in the dependency from GitHub - on every update. Well that gets tedious really quickly so I'm now using the npm link command which is pretty handy. I hadn't seen it before so this blog post is basically the cheat sheet I wrote when I started using it...
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Updating Local Git Repos When Upstream Moves
09 January 2017
Read moreThe scenario: the "main" repository of a git project has changed, either an organisation rebranded, a project got a new maintainer, or a fork became the acknowledged master. In Subversion, this was the svn switch command and git has an equivalent. It's relatively easy in git to change your upstream - once you know how - so don't be tempted to just delete your local repo and re-clone! We can do better than that :)
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Alexa, When's the Bus?
30 December 2016
Read moreI got an Amazon Echo for my birthday (from my husband, who took romantic to a new level when he liked my present so much he bought me an Amazon dot a week later so he could use the echo elsewhere in the house!), which is a new gadget for us. Of course I started asking her questions that she couldn't answer ... and you can write your own "skills" so of course I sat down to browse the documentation and ended up creating a working skill for her :) It was a fun process but there were lots of unfamiliar parts to it so I thought I'd blog what I did in case anyone else wants to try out creating skills as well, and in case I ever want to remember some of the stuff I know now!
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Lorna's Bluemix Cheatsheet
19 December 2016
Read moreI work for IBM which means I get to play with Bluemix, their cloud platform. I use this mostly from the commandline as the tools are great and I find it the easiest way to work - but I keep having to look up the commands I need so here's my cheatsheet covering the stuff I use the most. It's here for me to refer to easily but if it's helpful to you too, then great!