-
Using Config Files with Ngrok
13 August 2018
Read moreI'm a huge fan of Ngrok, a tool to create a secure tunnel to your laptop. It is brilliant for testing, well, anything running locally really. Someone asked me about my setup recently and I'm using a couple of config files to keep things quick and consistent, so I thought I'd share here what I shared with them.
You can use a central config file for ngrok, and/or specific config files for each project. I use both, so I'll show you around my setup.
-
Kitchen Island Project
14 July 2018
Read moreWe built our first "big" project (well, since the play kitchen a few years ago) since moving to this house nearly a year ago: a new kitchen island! I used to blog a lot about the house and crafts and things, then I got better known for code things and got stagefright and stopped ... but I love this stuff and I'll blog it if I want to :)
-
Presenting from PDF
09 July 2018
Read moreI've been using PDF as a file format for presentations for the last ~8 years and I LOVE it. The clue is in the name: Portable Document Format: it's an open standard, and works everywhere. You can embed your fonts, images, whatever ... if you end up presenting it from another machine for some reason, everything is going work, even when you want to upload the slides afterwards. Yet, it's still a pretty unusual choice, I think because people don't know much about the tooling around it - so I thought I'd share some of my tips.
Today: tools for actually delivering a PDF presentation (I make them with rst2pdf ).
-
React to Database Changes with OpenWhisk Actions
23 April 2018
Read moreOne of the best features of CouchDB is its change feed which allows us to get a feed of the changes happening on our database. It's also possible to have a serverless function (examples are for IBM Cloud Functions but should also work for Apache OpenWhisk) that fires in response to activity on that change feed. I have a database of events that I want to react to when they happen, but the change feed doesn't include the actual document that was added - but you can add one of the built-in functions to a sequence to make that happen. This post will show how to achieve this by wiring up a built-in action to fetch the document with another action of our own that then handles the data.
-
Copying CouchDB Data Between Laptops
02 January 2018
Read moreI'm a regular and happy user of Apache CouchDB, so much so in fact that I'm writing a library to talk to it from PHP. While working on tweaking a feature, I realised that the laptop I use for development didn't have the right/enough data on it to test …
-
Login and Switch Spaces With Bluemix CLI
28 November 2017
Read moreAfter answering a bunch of questions about the Bluemix CLI tool for IBM Cloud, I thought I'd share my personal cheatsheet in case it helps anyone looking for examples!
-
Live Demo: Risks and Rewards
17 November 2017
Read moreI'm not a huge fan of the live demo in conference talks - it's really hard to do well so I see a very large number of bad ones. Also, it's super hard work to include them in my own talks in a meaningful way because they are so difficult to pull off. I could write a very long list of reasons not to ever live demo (nobody wants to watch you type, now you are talking to your laptop, conference wifi rarely works, you could tell me three much more useful things in the time you've spent doing this ...) but in truth as developers we love the "new shiny" and it can be super helpful to get an actual walkthrough of how to do a particular thing. So if you absolutely must live demo, here's my own general plan and tactics:
-
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 …
