I'm a developer advocate who loves the web platform, APIs, AI, and basically just anything involving code. I love to write about technology and share that with others. I've got fun stuff to show you and I'm so happy you're here!
Welcome to my corner of the internet where I share insights about development, best and sometimes questionable practices, and cat demos.
I've got a number of bots I've built for both fun and learning (well mostly fun), most of which were running on Pipedream. Sadly, Pipedream is shutting down. I'd naturally consider Val Town instead... but it's shutting down too. Yeah, wonderful times in tech these days, eh?
Every now and then I put a service, API, framework, etc on my list of things to look at, and when I eventually get around to it, I wish I had made the time sooner. That's absolutely the case today. About two weeks ago I blogged about how I used TinyJS to build a desktop note application. This worked great and made use of a local SQLite database on the machine for storage. I was curious about how I'd migrate this to a "real" network based storage system that could be used in multiple places and tied to a particular account. I asked my AI agent (in this case, Claude, which I tend to use for all of my ad hoc questions about stuff) if Supabase would be an appropriate solution for this, and the response I got impressed the heck out of me.
A few years back I shared two cool tips I learned about Postman ("Dynamically Creating Variables in Postman" and "Creating Visualizations in Postman"). At the time, I noted that these were both well documented features in Postman and if I had bothered to actually spend some time in the docs, I would have known about those features already. Obviously after I wrote those posts I made the time to do that. Obviously... right?
As I say from time to time, every now and then I build something as a proof of concept and the result is... ok? I'm not really sure if the idea actually made sense and if the final result is usable, but the exploration was interesting enough that I think it warrants sharing with you good people. That's what today's post is.
Happy Sunday, and happy "Saints have a bye week so they can't lose" day. That may be bitter and I shouldn't write off their season yet but... maybe next year? Of course, this is just one more kinda crappy thing going on amongst a giant pile of other crappy things so - let's just get right to the links, shall we?
Last week I shared a demo ("Generating PDFs from Word Templates with officeParser") that made use of the awesome officeParser open source library. That demo was a simple "customer report" web app that took custom data and a Word template. Once the form was submitted, the library converted tokens in the Word template to real data and output a PDF. I decided to build another demo using the library, this time on the server with a simple Node.js script.
Want to read everything? Head over to my giant list of every single freaking post ever!