Earlier this month, I blogged about building my own Spotify Unwrapped. I did this by requesting a data export from Spotify and playing around with the data in Python and Astro. I built a simple, and probably bad, Astro site to view my stats. When I built it, I had an idea for a slight tweak to make it a bit better, but one that would require API usage. I stand by what I said about not wanting to use the API anymore (feel free to ask why in the comments), but I couldn't resist tinkering one more time. Here's what I did.
A few weeks ago I blogged a demo where I used Chrome's on-device AI feature to parse a "generic template language" and return random strings. If you're so inclined (and of course you are), you can read that post here: "Creating a Generic Generative Language with Chrome AI". The idea was to give the AI model a template string that described what was random, and how it was random (this is a name, this is a number, this is a color, etc) and have the model fill in the blanks with appropriate values.
Tis the season - the Spotify Unwrapped season. If you aren't aware, Spotify creates a yearly "recap" of your listening habits and packages it up in a nice and fun slide show/animated doodad only available on your device. It's a cute thing and as someone who both loves music and stats, I look forward to it. If your curious, here's a part of mine:
Once again I'm here, sharing links, and apologizing for the lack of content this month, although I did publish seven times, and I think I had some good demos, so maybe I should just stop worrying about it? ;) As I've hinted recently, I am no longer on the job market! I haven't said where yet as I wanted to get a few weeks under my belt to ensure things were going to be ok. I'm not going to lie, my last role (and quick lay off) really messed me up a bit. That being said, I feel relatively safe now, and really like what both my role and my coworkers, so I figure it's time to share!
This is just a quick thought experiment really. Yesterday I was working on a demo that made use of Google's Static Map API. I've blogged about this API for probably over a decade now and I rarely see people use it, but it's a lightweight, image only "API" for when you need simple map images without interactivity. Honestly, I see a lot of sites using the full JavaScript maps library when a simpler image would be fine. It's also an excellent way to use maps in presentations or emails as well. It occurred to me that the static map image could be a great way use of print media queries in CSS and I thought I'd build a quick demo to show this.
I am really excited about this post as it's one of the most powerful changes I've seen to Google's Gemini APIs in quite some time. For a while now it's been really easy to perform searches against a document, or a group of documents. You would upload the file (or files), ask your questions, and that was all you needed.
Want to read everything? Head over to my giant list of every single freaking post ever!.
