Raymond is an experienced developer evangelist and advocate. He focuses on APIs, AI, the web platform, and enterprise cat demos.
Hey folks! One of the things I promised to do better with the Code Break show was scheduling. With that being said, I'm here to announce the next event and I've got about 4 already on the calendar after that. Hopefully this year I can get a bit more consistent with schedule. That being said, we'll see. Life is crazy at times. ;)
As part of my efforts to improve my Python knowledge, I've been looking at the Flask framework for a way to build Python-backed web apps. I've only been looking at it for a short time, but I'm really impressed with how simple it is. In some ways, it reminds me a lot of when I first saw Express. Before that, I wasn't sure I was going to like Node.js as it felt like a lot of work to build a simple app, but Express handled a lot of the boring parts. The same applies to Flask. To get an idea of how easy it is, here's the basic "hello world" from the quickstart:
Welcome to the first Links For You of 2025. I'm currently writing this from, I kid you not, the Danube in Austria. My wife and I are a bit over halfway through a European vacation (one we planned before Adobe decided to give me an early Christmas gift of a layoff). So far, it's been absolutely glorious, and I plan on writing about the experience later this month. On with the links!
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, a way to monitor sentiment of keywords in real time. Here's what I created.
For a while now I've had a tradition here where I end my "blog year" with a wrap up post looking back at how the year went and figuring out what I want for the upcoming year. This is, honestly, a post just for myself, but as usual, I'm always open to what people think, so feel free to leave me a comment below.
Welcome to the last Links For You for 2024. Believe it or not, I started this series way back in April of 2022, and I don't know about you, but it's been one of my favorite features of my blog. I love sharing cool links (and music videos!) with readers, and I hope yall have enjoyed it as well. This is my second to last post for the year so there's still a bit more content coming, but for now, let's get into the cool stuff!
For my last technical post of the year (although I can't promise I'll stop blogging!), I wanted to share an interesting workflow I built using Google Gemini and Pipedream. The idea was somewhat simple - how difficult would it be to build a "general purpose" workflow to look for objects in images and trigger an alert if certain things were found. Here's what I was able to build.
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