Raymond is an experienced developer evangelist and advocate. He focuses on APIs, AI, the web platform, and enterprise cat demos.

Latest Posts

Upcoming Webinars

Good morning, programs. I wanted to share some news about two upcoming webinars. The first is my next Code Break show, "Building Desktop Apps with Python and Flet - Part Deux", happening next Tuesday, June 24th, at 12PM CST. As you can tell by the title, I'll be continuing my look at the awesome Flet project and seeing if I can finish the app I started last time. If you don't remember, it's quite deadly... (And be sure to check out the last session for the first part!)

Sorting Out Your Monarchs with BoxLang

I know what you're thinking right now - a monarch problem? How did Raymond know I had a monarch problem? What can I say, with great age comes great wisdom, or, more likely, random code challenges. I've mentioned "rendezvous with cassidoo" before as one of the newsletters I subscribe to. Authored by the very interesting Cassidy Williams, this short and sweet newsletter always has interesting content and always ends with a basic code challenge, what she calls her 'interview question of the week'. This weeks question was pretty fun:

My ColdFusion 2025 Hackathon Submission - QuickTracker

Earlier this month, the ColdFusion team announced a hackathon that started today, and ends Monday night. Full disclosure, when I saw the announcement, I thought that the date range is when things had to be turned in. I spent a few hours on what I'm going to share below, but when I found out that the intent was to start today, I wrapped up and stopped. My submission only took a few hours, and outside of a quick readme update today, I feel fine with my submission. And heck, it was fun to build, so I don't really care if I win (ok, that's a bit of a lie). With that out of the way, let me share what I created, QuickTracker.cfm.

Using BoxLang's Cache Services

Recently I've been looking at BoxLang's Caching service, mostly because the docs were updated which made it easier to dig into it. ;) My usual expectation for a caching service is typically a key/value system with APIs to get and set and hopefully a simple way to handle expiration. So for example, I can ideally store a cache value and an expiration values at the same time, and if I fetch it later and it's expired, I get a nice null value back. As I said, that's the 'baseline' for what I expect, so I was kind of blown away, and a bit overwhelmed honestly, with what you can do on the BoxLang platform. At a high level, here's some of the details:

Links For You (6/8/25)

Welcome to another edition of my "this was supposed to be down on Saturday" biweekly list of links. Yesterday my wife and I made pretzels at home for the first time. It was a rather simple recipe that didn't need any boiling and they came out incredible. We also watched the new Predator movie, Killer of Killers, which was quite spectacular. I definitely recommend watching it when you can. Ok, on with the links!

Working with the Mastodon API in BoxLang

So remember a long time ago (Tuesday), when I blogged about using the Bluesky API with BoxLang? As expected, I'm following that up today with a look at using the Mastodon APIs. Personally, I'm down to just two social networks, Bluesky and Mastodon. Originally I was using Mastodon a lot more, but I've been vibing with Bluesky more lately so I tend to check it more often. That being said, whenever I release a new blog post, I've got an automated process to post to both, so I thought I should cover both for BoxLang as well.

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