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HTTP Tools Roundup
03 July 2017
Read moreAt a conference a few days ago, I put up a slide with a few of my favourite tools on it. I got some brilliant additional recommendations in return from twitter so I thought I'd collect them all in one place in case anyone is interested - all these tools are excellent for anyone working APIs (so that's everyone!). First, my original slide:
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Deploying OpenWhisk Actions With Dependencies
29 June 2017
Read moreI mostly use OpenWhisk with NodeJS (which is lucky for me, it's the best supported of the languages and default for the documentation examples!) and while there are a bunch of npm modules already installed on OpenWhisk, sometimes there will be others that you also want to include. Alternatively or additionally, you might also want to deploy your package.json since this can specify the entry point if it's not index.js which is the default.
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Building Conversations With Alexa
26 June 2017
Read moreHaving an Amazon Echo Dot in my office is quite fun, and I've accidentally started writing more skills and giving a few talks about building skills for the Alexa toolchain. Today I created a skill that uses multiple steps to make a conversation and thought I'd better write down what I did so I'd be able to remember!
The basic idea is that when creating the "intent", i.e. the action that you want Alexa to do, you also define "slots". The slots are the variables; if this were a command line tool, they'd be the arguments you typed. It's possible to include both intent and slots in your wording when you speak to Alexa, but equally you can just invoke the skill and have it prompt you for the rest of the information.
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Package Parameters in OpenWhisk
18 May 2017
Read moreI love OpenWhisk but I struggled a little to get the parameters attached in a sane way for a while so I am capturing my notes here for future reference! Parameters can be attached to actions or packages; I tend to break my actions down really small and pass data into them, while preferring to set parameters on the package that the actions belong to.
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Where was that GitHub Discussion?
19 April 2017
Read moreDid GitHub change their activity feed? Or am I getting more confused now I contribute to so many different projects that I'm not a maintainer of? Either way, I struggle sometimes to find the pull request or issue that I had a discussion on to revisit or continue that discussion …
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Multiple Search Keys in CouchDB
21 March 2017
Read moreI work quite a bit with CouchDB (Cloudant, a hosted CouchDB solution, is part of Bluemix, IBM's cloud platform - and I work for IBM so I get to use this as much as I like) and today I found a feature I hadn't seen before. I struggled to find the docs, so I thought I'd post my working example here in case anyone else is solving a similar problem: wanting to use more than one set of key ranges when filtering a CouchDB view.
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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!
