Creating A Basic Chrome Extension

Chrome Extensions have been around for a long time. I believe they are a very under-explored technology - and if you’re a traditional web developer, there’s a very small learning curve since Chrome Extensions are comprised of HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Bonus - you don’t have to worry about every browser under the sun, just Chrome! (though Firefox is becoming extension-friendly, it might be a good idea to not include Chrome-only web features).

Peer-To-Peer Storage With A Raspberry Pi And Resilio Sync

I’ve been slowly trying to cut down on my online file storage footprint by switching to software and tools that I’m in full control over. For example, I was once a very heavy user of Dropbox and similar tools when it came to transferring files around between my computers, but that could leave my files exposed in the cloud, not to mention it was slow due to the time it took to communicate with the remote server.

This is where Resilio Sync comes into play. Once called, BitTorrent Sync, this software allows you to transfer files between devices on your network, without a middleman, in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion, like you would find with the popular BitTorrent protocol. The more devices, the faster the synchronization.

We’re going to see how to install and configure Resilio Sync on a Raspberry Pi to act as a synchronization node on your network for file storage and fast transfers.

Inheritance And Composition In A PHP Application

As developers, we have encountered scenarios where some of the code we write can be reused by other code pieces. This has brought the concepts of code reuse in paradigms like object oriented programming. In this article, the author seeks to explain when to reuse code as well as how to achieve code reuse.

TPDP Episode #21: Developer Evangelism

I am pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast, titled, Developer Evangelism, is available for download on all the major podcast networks.

In this episode I’m joined by Matthew Revell, founder of Hoopy and DevRelCon, where we discuss a potential career path for developers and marketers known as Developer Evangelism.

Profiling UI Layouts In Android For Performance Improvements

Something that any application should be concerned with is performance. One way to look at performance is via profiling. Most IDEs and platforms provide tools to profile your application to take a look at detailed system information about various parts of your application. With Android applications you can execute an adb command to generate a very thorough snapshot of the graphics information and that’s what we’re going to look at in this post.

Emulate Classic Video Games On A Raspberry Pi Zero With RetroPie

Are you into video games, because I certainly am. Did you grow up playing the classics on your Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Nintendo 64? I did, and I still can’t get enough of them. If you’re like me and love video games and want to go back to simpler times, you can actually build your own entertainment station that contains a mashup of all the best consoles.

We’re going to see how to use an incredibly affordable Raspberry Pi Zero W to create an entertainment system the size of a pack of gum that can emulate all the classics using a custom flavor of Linux called RetroPie.

Convert Data Between CSV And JSON With Simple JavaScript

A popular subject on the blog has always been around the conversion of one data format to another data format. For example we’ve already seen how to convert XML data to JSON data with JavaScript, but what if we wanted to work with comma separated value (CSV) data instead?

We’re going to see how to take a CSV file, parse it into JSON, make some changes, and then convert it back into a CSV file using Node.js and a few readily available packages.