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 had an idea for a possible experiment using Chrome's built-in AI support - looking for "date" references in strings. So for example: "I will have my new job in 12 days". Could the AI model recognize "12 days" as a date and determine what the actual date is, assuming a reference date of now? I was about to start working on a simple POC when I thought... wait... is there already a JavaScript library for this?
This squarely falls into the "everyone probably knows this but it didn't click with me right away" category so please feel free to laugh at my ignorance, but it's something I realized over the past few months, and as I just used this technique this morning, I figured I'd share it on the blog. The idea is simple - it's trivial to ask a Gen AI tool to do something for you - and depending on the ask, may work great. But what I realized a few months back, especially in regards to having AI parse data, is that you can also use the opportunity to generate a tool (like a Python or Node script) so you don't need to return to the AI tool again. This becomes especially useful if you want to slightly tweak the output over time or gradually add more features.
Greetings and salutations, readers. It's been a few weeks since I shared one of these, mostly due to the job search being somewhat exhausting, but I've got a backup of links so it's time to get back in the habit. And of course, it's Father's Day and I want to wish all the dads out there (myself included) a very happy father's day. This weekend I got to officiate my first wedding (for my brother-in-law and his fiance) so my plan today is to do... nothing. Enjoy your links!
Many years ago, I made the switch from building primarily app-server backed sites (using Node, ColdFusion, PHP, etc) to fully static sites using tools like Jekyll, Hugo, and Eleventy. For the most part, it was a great shift in how I build, but there were a few things I had to figure out in that new world - one of them was simple form handling. While I could have used serverless just fine, it felt like overkill. Luckily, there were a few services out there that catered to this need. You would simply use a unique action for your form and that service would handle collecting the form data, emailing it to you, and redirecting the user back to the site.
Ok, chalk this up to something I may never actually use in production, but I was curious how well the browser would handle changing the favicon of a tab on the fly, and combining that with Cloudinary to dynamically modify the source. The inspiration for this was something simple - Google Calendar's favicon is unique per day, so for example, right now I see this:
It's hard to believe I first experimented with Diffbot nearly five years ago. You can see that first post up on the Adobe Medium account - Natural Language Processing, Adobe PDF Extract, and Deep PDF Intelligence. Since then I've tested out various APIs and features from them and was lucky enough to connect with them recently about a new initiative, a web search API.
Want to read everything? Head over to my giant list of every single freaking post ever!