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.
Yesterday I blogged about using PDF.js and Chrome's on-device AI to create summaries of PDF documents, all within the browser, for free. In that post I mentioned it would be possible to build a Q and A system so users could ask questions about the document, and like a dog with a bone, I couldn't let it go. Last I built not one, but two demos of this. Check it out.
You can take the man out of the PDFs, but you can't take the PDFs out of the man. Ok, I'm not sure that exactly makes sense, but with a couple years in me of working with PDFs, I find myself using them quite often with my AI demos. For today, I'm going to demonstrate something that's been on my mind in a while - doing summarizing of PDFs completely in the browser, with Chrome's on-device AI. Unlike the Prompt API, summarization has been released since Chrome 138, so most likely those of you on Chrome can run these demos without problem. (You can see more about the AI API statuses if you're curious.)
I write this in the midst of a huge ice event - which thankfully isn't so bad here in south Louisiana. We're very cold and rainy, but no real ice yet, which is good. The worst is coming in later tonight and the schools have already shut down, but thankfully I work at home so there's no need to get on the roads. Today is also the 26th birthday of my eldest child, which makes the age ranges of my little army (8 kids total) go from 10 to 26. Wow.
Back in November of last year I wrote up a blog post talking about a new (at the time) Google Gemini feature, File Stores: "Gemini File Search and File Stores for Easy RAG". In that post I discussed what it was, how it worked, and built up a simple example. You should definitely read that post first, but if you want the TLDR, here ya go:
Happy Saturday folks, and while this is a topic I've covered many times here, I was bored and wanting to write some code, so I whipped up a quick demo. One of my favorite uses of AI is to take abstract data and write a human readable form of it. Now to be clear, this is not something you need AI for. Given that you know the shape of your data, you can create your own summary using hard-coded rules about what values to show, how to present them, and so forth. What I like about the Gen AI use-case for this is the amount of randomness and creativity you get in the responses. In the past I've done this with weather forecasts and chart data, but today I thought I'd try something different - monsters.
Happy 2026, programs! As this is the first Links For You for the year, I figure it may be good to remind folks why I write these. Social media can be a great place to share links with folks, but it's very much hit or miss. Someone may share something incredibly cool that you would love to boost, but if you miss it, you're out of luck. I subscribe to many listservs that share good tech links, but a while ago I thought it would be cool to share and promote links I thought were especially cool. Obviously that's pretty opinionated, but that's why you're here, right? Each of these posts will have three links, typically but not always tech related, and a fourth entry that is 100% just for fun. Enjoy!
Want to read everything? Head over to my giant list of every single freaking post ever!