Perform Different Text Animations With jQuery

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

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

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

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.

Writing Self Hosted Alexa Skills With Golang

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to win an Echo Dot in a company hackathon. Since then I have been trying to develop Alexa Skills that interest me in my spare time. Before exploring this new field of development, I had been interested in learning and practicing a language that was new to me, Golang (or just Go). Considering Alexa skills are based on web services, one of the area where Go excels, it seemed like a great way to “have my cake and eat it too.”

It was a couple of months ago when I came across a great post by Nic Raboy on writing about writing Alexa Skills with Golang and AWS Lambda which can be found here. Most of the Skills I have developed started before Lambda had first-class support for Go so I am much more comfortable writing Skills using self-hosted web services. Using Lambda for Alexa Skills is definitely a great approach but there are some instances where using your own server might make more sense. If you are looking to reuse an existing server or rapidly prototype an idea then maybe it makes more sense to use this approach.

In this post, I will detail the steps necessary to deploy a web service that can be used to fulfill Alexa Skill requests. To make it easier to compare this approach with using Lambda, the functionality of the Skill will remain almost identical to Nic Raboy’s example. It is only the deployment process that will be changed.

My Activity Report For 2018

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.

Manage Sessions Over HTTPS With Node.js And Vue.js

A long time ago when I had been exploring session management in Node.js, I had written a tutorial titled, Session Management in Your Express.js Web Application. This was a basic tutorial that is still very functional today, however little things have changed since then when it comes to how the web works. For example, in 2015 HTTPS was never a requirement and we weren’t exposed to all the frontend web frameworks that exist today.

When you start introducing things into your web applications such as HTTPS or micro-services that operate on different origins or ports, or frontend frameworks, session management can get a little more complicated. We’re going to see how to maintain a session for a user using Node.js with Express.js on our backend and Vue.js on our frontend, in this tutorial.