Author: Nic Raboy

Continuous Integration With GitLab CI And Docker Using A Raspberry Pi

January 21, 2019 Nic Raboy

I know I've mentioned this before, but I've recently started to get serious about my content production and deployment approach on The Polyglot Developer. My goal is to be able to write my tutorials in Markdown, push to GitLab, and have it automatically deployed as a Docker container on my production server. Being able to automate things and take advantage of Docker will definitely improve my productivity in the long term.

So I've been playing around with tools on the subject, more specifically GitLab, because that is what I'm using to save a history of the blog. GitLab is a source code repository, but also a whole lot more given its ability to do continuous integration, continuous deployment, and work with Docker directly.

We're going to take a look at installing GitLab and Docker on a Raspberry Pi, then configuring a GitLab CI Runner to take control of our continuous integration process every time we push some code. While it might sound easy, there are some certain things that aren't so obvious in the setup and configuration.

Query A GraphQL API With Vue.js And Axios

January 16, 2019 Nic Raboy

I've written quite a bit of content around developing a GraphQL API with various programming technologies such as Node.js, Golang, and Java. Heck, I even wrote an eBook on the subject titled, Web Services for the JavaScript Developer. However, I haven't really produced any content around interacting with those APIs using modern frameworks and client facing technologies, only cURL and Postman.

So how do you interact with a GraphQL API using something like Angular, React, or Vue.js?

There are a lot of frameworks to cover, but in this particular tutorial we're going to see how to use Vue.js and simple JavaScript to interact with a GraphQL API.

Perform Different Text Animations With jQuery

January 14, 2019 Nic Raboy

When it comes to my name, there is often a lot of confusion. On social media sites such as Twitter, GitHub, and similar, I often go by nraboy which is the first character of my first name (Nic) followed by my last name (Raboy). When people see that, they often think of The National Rifle Association (NRA), which is obviously unrelated to what I'm trying to present myself as. However, due to the NRA acronym being similar to my online handles, I get included on a lot of crazy conversations that I really don't want to be a part of. In fact, it is one of the main reasons why the blog was rebranded from blog.nraboy.com to thepolyglotdeveloper.com.

Out of this I decided to create an animation showing the obvious. Rather than putting my video editing skills to the test, I decided to create an animation using jQuery and simple JavaScript. In this tutorial we're going to play around with some text animations using jQuery.

A Recap Of CES 2019

January 12, 2019 Nic Raboy

This past week I had the honor of attending the consumer electronics show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada. This had been a lifelong goal of mine to attend the event and get a firsthand look at all the latest and greatest technology releasing in 2019.

While mostly unrelated to development and the material typically found on The Polyglot Developer, I wanted to give a summary of the event with some of the things I enjoyed and some of the things I didn't about the event.

Create Custom Shortcodes To Embed Content In Hugo Posts And Pages

January 9, 2019 Nic Raboy

I've mentioned this numerous times before, but The Polyglot Developer is powered by Hugo which is a static site generator that takes Markdown and converts it to HTML. While Markdown is easy to use and can accomplish quite a bit, the syntax doesn't accomplish everything that you'd hope to accomplish when it comes to a website. For example audio and video aren't a thing in Markdown while it is in HTML. So how do you add custom components to a Hugo article?

In Hugo, you can create what is called a shortcode, which is a custom tag that gets processed differently than standard Markdown syntax. We're going to see how to create shortcodes to take Hugo posts and pages to the next level.

Implementing U2F Authentication With Hardware Keys Using Node.js and Vue.js

January 7, 2019 Nic Raboy

Not too long ago I had written a tutorial titled, U2F Authentication with a YubiKey Using Node.js and jQuery, which demonstrated how to use hardware keys as a means of universal two-factor (U2F) authentication. However, I had left some things to be desired in that previous post. For example, the previous tutorial did not use proper session management with Express.js and it used jQuery, which is neat, but by no means is as popular as some of the other web frameworks that currently exist.

In this tutorial, we're going to expand upon what we had done previously, but implement proper session management with Express.js and use Vue.js, which is a modern web framework.

My Activity Report For 2018

December 24, 2018 Nic Raboy

The 2018 year is winding down so it is time to reflect on some of the things that have happened in terms of The Polyglot Developer and all of its channels.

Let this be a statistics report for everything that has happened on the blog, YouTube channel, and podcast. If you're interested in adventuring into the world of technical content production, this will give you some perspective into what to expect.