TPDP E38: COBOL Development on the Mainframe

If you’re interested in learning about COBOL, you’ll find a lot of value in, COBOL Development on the Mainframe, the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast.

There’s been a lot of buzz around COBOL in recent news, which is amazing considering how far the programming technology dates back. In this episode of the podcast, I’m joined by Elizabeth Joseph from IBM, and we discuss the things that COBOL does well, where it’s used the most, and why it’s making such a huge comeback.

You don’t have to be a system admin, mainframe developer, or COBOL expert to get a lot of value out of this episode.

Searching for Nearby Points of Interest with MongoDB and Mapbox

When it comes to location data, MongoDB’s ability to work with GeoJSON through geospatial queries is often under-appreciated. Being able to query for intersecting or nearby coordinates while maintaining performance is functionality a lot of organizations are looking for.

Take the example of maintaining a list of business locations or even a fleet of vehicles. Knowing where these locations are, relative to a particular position isn’t an easy task when doing it manually.

In this tutorial we’re going to explore the $near operator within a MongoDB Realm application to find stored points of interest within a particular proximity to a position. These points of interest will be rendered on a map using the Mapbox service.

Real-Time Location Changes with MongoDB Realm, Change Streams, and Mapbox

When it comes to modern web applications, interactions often need to be done in real-time. This means that instead of periodically checking in for changes, watching or listening for changes often makes more sense.

Take the example of tracking something on a map. When it comes to package shipments, device tracking, or anything else where you need to know the real-time location, watching for those changes in location is great. Imagine needing to know where your fleet is so that you can dispatch them to a nearby incident?

When it comes to MongoDB, watching for changes can be done through change streams. These change streams can be used in any of the drivers, including front-end applications with MongoDB Realm.

In this tutorial, we’re going to leverage MongoDB Realm change streams. When the location data in our NoSQL documents change, we’re going to update the information on an interactive map powered by Mapbox.

Scan for Broken Links on a Website with JavaScript

Building a website isn’t a difficult task in a lot of circumstances, but maintaining a website is a totally different story. When it comes to larger scale websites or blogs such as The Polyglot Developer, content can become out of date at any time, and it’s more likely to happen the longer the content appears on the site.

Stale content and content that doesn’t work, whether that be through links, formatting, or something else, can severely damage how you rank in search results and the overall growth of your website.

Let’s dig a little deeper into links for example.

You’re probably going to have links on your website, whether they be internal or external in terms of where they route to. As your website evolves, or as the external websites evolve, those links might change and break. Broken links create a poor experience, something that Google and other search engines take into consideration when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO).

In this tutorial, we’re going to use simple JavaScript to find all of the broken links on an entire website, not just the current page.

Live-Streaming on Twitch for Beginners, Released

I’m pleased to announce that Live-Streaming on Twitch for Beginners, has been released to the courses portal on The Polyglot Developer website!

After having seen the growing interest in the few Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) and Twitch tutorials that were released on the blog, it only made sense to dig deeper into the subject and construct a course that goes over more material.

If you’re interested in broadcasting live content to Twitch, but aren’t sure where to start, Live-Streaming on Twitch for Beginners, is worth checking out.

TPDP E37: Writing Tests in a Development Project

I’m pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast has been published!

In Writing Tests in a Development Project, the topic is testing and it features repeat guest Corbin Crutchley, author and co-founder at Unicorn Utterances.

Writing tests can often feel overwhelming, or a chore, and it prevents a lot of developers from including them when developing, but the goal of the episode is to break things down and make it easier to understand and implement.

If you’ve been curious about the different types of tests to include in the development process, whether that be unit tests, integration tests, end to end tests, or something else, this is the podcast episode for you.

Location Geofencing with MongoDB, Stitch, and Mapbox

For a lot of organizations, when it comes to location, geofencing is often a very desirable or required feature. In case you’re unfamiliar, a geofence can be thought of as a virtual perimeter for a geographic area. Often, you’ll want to know when something enters or exits that geofence so that you can apply your own business logic. Such logic might include sending a notification or updating something in your database.

MongoDB supports GeoJSON data and offers quite a few operators that make working the location data easy.

When it comes to geofencing, why would you want to use a database like MongoDB rather than defining boundaries directly within your client-facing application? Sure, it might be easy to define and manage one or two boundaries, but when you’re working at scale, checking to see if something has exited or entered one of many boundaries could be a hassle.

In this tutorial, we’re going to explore the $near and $geoIntersects operators within MongoDB to define geofences and see if we’re within the fences. For the visual aspect of things, we’re going to make use of Mapbox for showing our geofences and our location.