Share Internet Between macOS and a Raspberry Pi Zero Over USB

If you’re a fan of the Raspberry Pi, you might have stumbled upon my tutorial for interacting with a Raspberry Pi Zero using nothing more than a USB cable. If you recall, the standard Raspberry Pi Zero has no WiFi, no Bluetooth, and no Ethernet.

Alright, so let’s assume that you’re able to interact with your Raspberry Pi Zero. Now what? How do you update it, download new software, or work on some awesome projects that might require internet in some fashion?

Well, you could take a look at my tutorial titled, Three Simple Ways to get Online with a Raspberry Pi Zero IoT Device, or you could share the internet of your host computer without having to purchase any extra hardware.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to share the internet from our host device, assuming that host is macOS.

Moving to Dart from C++

A couple of days ago, while recovering from some flu, I managed to catch up a bit of me reading. If you know anything about the life of an independent contractor, you’d know that there’s never time for your personal projects or hobbies, so this was a most welcome break.

One of my favorite blogs is this one and I saw a great article on Sorting vectors in C++ by Nic Raboy. As it happens, C++ is one of my first commercial languages and I still make some moderate use of it for various mobile projects.

One thing that struck me, as I read the code, was how close this was to the Dart programming language. I’ve been doing a lot of Flutter development of late, and have been making more use of the Dart programming language. Mobile applications often contain complex logic, and this is where Dart has really proven it’s worth to me, in both being a concise and expressive language, but also being familiar enough that I didn’t have to learn everything from scratch to be productive.

In this short tutorial, we’ll take the quicksort algorithm Nic has built in C++ and convert it to Dart. Along the way, we’ll see how close Dart is to C++ and how much of your existing C++ knowledge easily transfers to the Dart environment.

Image Cropping, Zooming, and Scaling with Angular and JavaScript

When building a web application there is a good chance you’re going to need to work with images eventually, even if it is something as simple as allowing a user to upload a profile image. In theory this is a simple task, but in reality, your website theme is probably anticipating images of a certain resolution or aspect ratio. If the user tries to upload an image that doesn’t meet your requirements, it might break your theme.

We’re going to see how to include image manipulation capabilities in your Angular application using the popular cropperjs JavaScript package.

TPDP Episode #28: Coding Bootcamps vs Traditional Computer Science Degrees

I am pleased to announce that the 28th episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast titled, Coding Bootcamps vs Traditional Computer Science Degrees, has been released to all of the major podcast networks!

In this episode I’m joined by Ben Nelson, founder of Lambda School, an increasingly popular coding bootcamp and an alternative approach to a Computer Science degree that you’d typically get at a four year or more institution. The topic that we discuss is around coding bootcamps in general, not limited to Lambda School, and how they could be beneficial for new developers attempting to enter the workforce.

Getting Started with Building Chatbots using AWS Lex and Node.js

Amazon and a lot of cloud vendors such as Microsoft and Google have services around machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual assistants. A popular one that might come to mind is Amazon Alexa, something I’ve written quite a few tutorials around over the years.

The concept around Alexa is simple. Provide the Alexa service some audio, have that audio converted into text or some other format that can be evaluated, execute some code, and respond with something to be spoken to the user. However, what if you didn’t necessarily want to use a virtual assistant with audio, but integrate as part of a chat application in the form of a chatbot?

In this tutorial we’re going to look at using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lex, which is a service for adding conversational interfaces to your applications. If you’re coming from an Amazon Alexa background, the concepts will be similar as AWS Lex shares the same deep learning technologies.

Monitoring GPS Data with the NEO 6M and Arduino

I recently wrote a tutorial titled, Configuring Visual Studio Code for Arduino Development, because I’ve been exploring the Internet of Things (IoT). Up until recently I’ve only had hands on experience with Raspberry Pi, but I’ve been expanding my knowledge with Arduino.

I have an Arduino Uno and a GPS module, so I thought it’d be a good idea to demonstrate how to use the two together.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to monitor a NEO 6M GPS module connected to an Arduino using a few lines of very simple code.

Configuring Visual Studio Code for Arduino Development

I’ve been playing around with an Arduino Uno recently, something new to me since I’ve always only used Raspberry Pi hardware. Many Arduino devices, or at least the Uno like I have are inexpensive and a lot of fun to play around with. However, the development experience out of the box isn’t exactly what I was familiar with or happy about. To develop and push code to an Arduino you need to use the Arduino Desktop IDE. If you’re like me, you’re a one IDE type of developer, so having to work in a different environment is a little less than ideal.

It doesn’t have to be that way when developing with Arduino though.

In this tutorial I’m going to walk you through configuring Visual Studio Code for Arduino development. You’ll be able to write code, deploy to hardware, and monitor the output.