Author: Nic Raboy

Using An Exit Intent Listener To Manage Popups On A Page

November 5, 2018 Nic Raboy

Not too long ago I wrote a tutorial titled, Create an Email Subscription Popup with jQuery, that demonstrated how to create popup modals within your web application. In this example the modals were presented on a timer. If you hadn't noticed, and I think most people did, The Polyglot Developer was using those modals for newsletter subscriptions exactly as demonstrated in the tutorial. The problem was that changes to the user experience on a timer felt intrusive no matter how long the timer. This was further validated through user feedback.

The feedback, which I always take seriously, lead me to changing how the modals were presented. Instead of using a timer, I had switched them to appear based on the users intent to leave the page or site. For clarity, an exit intent happens when the mouse leaves the website to interact with other things on the computer or within the browser.

In this tutorial, we're going to see how to take action based on exit intents with simple JavaScript as well as jQuery.

Build An Alexa Skill With Golang And AWS Lambda

October 22, 2018 Nic Raboy

It has been a few years since I last worked on and published an application, otherwise known as a Skill, for Alexa powered voice assistants. My last Skill titled, BART Control, was built out of necessity because of my commuting on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. While I didn't open source it, I had created the Skill with Node.js and a publicly available BART web service. Since then I had written a tutorial titled, Create an Amazon Alexa Skill Using Node.js and AWS Lambda, which also focused on Node.js.

I'm a huge fan of Golang and was pleased to see that AWS Lambda recently started to officially support it. AWS Lambda isn't a requirement to creating Alexa Skills, but it is a huge convenience. To make things even better, Amazon recently sent me an invitation to take part in their developer offer to receive an Amazon Echo Show for publishing another Skill. The offer and Golang inspired me to develop another Skill and this time I wanted to share my process.

Web Services For The JavaScript Developer, First Edition

October 20, 2018 Nic Raboy

I am pleased to announce the release of my first ever eBook titled, Web Services for the JavaScript Developer, which focuses on the development of REST and GraphQL APIs using JavaScript, Node.js, and various frameworks.

The book was designed to help make you successful at modeling and validating your data, designing queries, and anything related to creating web services.

Analyze Stack Overflow Data With Golang And HTTP

October 15, 2018 Nic Raboy

I was recently tasked with a project where I needed to gather data from Stack Overflow so it could be easily evaluated without having to dig around the website. Stack Exchange has many REST APIs available, some of which that don't even need tokens or authentication, so it came down to how I wanted to consume this data.

In this tutorial, we're going to see how to consume question and comment data from the Stack Exchange API using Golang and then export it to comma separated value (CSV) for further evaluation.

Build Electron Applications With Vue.js And Webpack

May 14, 2020 (Updated) Nic Raboy

If you're like me, you thought you'd try to build a cross-platform desktop application using the very popular Electron framework as well as the very popular Vue.js JavaScript framework. At first glance it might seem as easy as defining an Electron configuration, but in reality, a little more needs to be done when using Webpack to build the project.

I had written a few tutorials a while back around Electron, and even one with Vue.js, but in that example the Vue CLI and Webpack were not part of the equation. In this tutorial, we're going to see how to create a new Vue.js application using the Vue CLI, configure it for use with Electron, and then deploy it in all its glory.

TPDP Episode #22: NoSQL Databases And The Flexibility Of A Non-Relational Model

October 2, 2018 Nic Raboy

I am pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast is now available for download. In this episode titled, NoSQL Databases and the Flexibility of a Non-Relational Model, I'm joined by Matt Groves where we talk about use-cases for NoSQL versus relational databases and how to use NoSQL in your own applications.

Matt Groves and I used to work together at Couchbase, which is a NoSQL database company, and is by no means the focus of this episode. The focus is NoSQL in general and all the great things that you can do with it.

Developing A RESTful API With Node.js And MongoDB Atlas

September 28, 2018 Nic Raboy

Most modern web applications need to be able to handle data consumption requests and data manipulation requests from clients using HTTP. It is the norm to pass JSON data between these requests so it makes sense to use a NoSQL document database because JSON and similar is the common storage format, eliminating the need to marshal data to new formats in every request.

Lucky for us, leveraging these concepts and technologies is not a difficult task.

We're going to see how to create a RESTful API using Node.js and Express Framework that communicates to a cloud instance of MongoDB called Atlas.