Convert Amazon Links In A Hugo Site To Affiliate Links With Gulp

August 13, 2018 Nic Raboy

As you may already know, The Polyglot Developer is a statically generated website built with Hugo. That means that there are no databases involved, no server side languages, only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

In the past I shared the automated Gulp workflow that I use when building my blog to maintain performance and a solid standing with search engine optimization (SEO).

I received a request from a subscriber recently around affiliate link generation on a Hugo website and I figured it would be an interesting topic to tackle. Typically a WordPress plugin or similar would handle the job, but since we're working with a static website, we have to be inventive with our build scripts.

In this tutorial we're going to see how to build a Gulp task that will replace all Amazon links with Amazon Associates links, which is another name for their affiliate program.

Using NW.js To Convert A Website Into A Desktop Application

August 8, 2018 Ewald Horn

A while ago, I ran into a situation where I needed to make web application into a desktop application for a corporate client. The idea was to leverage as much of the existing app as possible, while still meeting the requirement of having a "desktop" application.

As a primarily Java developer, I had no idea how to do this, so I started doing research and found out that my best bet would be using JavaScript technologies.

Enter NW.js, a powerful mashup of Google Chrome and Node.js that allows you to package a web application to be run on the desktop.

TPDP Episode #20: GraphQL For API Development

August 7, 2018 Nic Raboy

I am pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast is available for download! If you've been keeping up with the blog recently, I've published quite a bit of content around GraphQL as I personally believe it to be the future for API development. Being able to access related and unrelated data on demand through a single endpoint is huge for the people consuming your data and huge for the developers creating the data because of specific model definitions.

In this episode titled, GraphQL for API Development, I'm joined by Lee Byron, one of the co-creators of GraphQL at when he worked at Facebook. Lee gives us all the details on how GraphQL came to be, why it is huge for development, and how to use it successfully in your next application.

Building A Hello World Example C++ Application

August 6, 2018 Nic Raboy

I decided to take some time every month to go back to the basics when it comes to development. As you might know, I earned a Computer Science degree from the University of California, Merced, and most of the courses I took involved C++ development. While some of the more modern code schools teach JavaScript, the common university will continue to teach C++ for the foreseeable future.

Getting started with something like C++ can seem like a daunting task, especially since C++ is such a powerful development language. We're going to see how to write, compile, and run a simple C++ application to help you get started with one of the more seasoned development options.

Getting Started With The Android SDK For NativeScript Development On MacOS

August 3, 2018 Nic Raboy

When it comes to mobile development, Android has always been a pain to deal with. While iOS has a terrible deployment to production experience, Android has a terrible installation and configuration experience.

I've been developing Android applications since before hybrid web and cross-platform native were a thing and up until recently, the Android installation experience has been unchanged. However, now things are different with a heavy push towards Android Studio and less towards the command line interface (CLI).

If you're like me and feel that Android Studio has no business in your NativeScript workflow, you're probably still interested in the Android CLI's less than ideal experience. We're going to see how to get setup on macOS with not only the Android CLI, but also the various packages and appropriate simulators for NativeScript development.

Simple Data Processing With JavaScript And The HERE API

August 1, 2018 Nic Raboy

Have you ever needed to work with comma separated value (CSV) data that wasn't formatted in a great way or figure out complete address information based on very little provided address information? While unrelated, these two topics come up quite a bit, more frequently when I'm dealing with person information or lead data that I retrieve from conferences and other events.

The great thing is that we live in a time where plenty of development libraries and services exist to make this process of data parsing and manipulation easy to accomplish in an automated fashion.

We're going to see how to take a CSV file representing partially complete people data and convert it to JSON. Then we're going to fill in the gaps when it comes to the geolocation side of things, using the HERE Geocoder API.

Serve Your Web Applications With Minimal Effort Using Caddy

July 30, 2018 Nic Raboy

I've been in the web game for quite some time and have my fair share of web server software. I've used Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS), Apache httpd, as well as NGINX, and while they all thrive in their own ways, they've been overkill for most of my use cases. This is where Caddy comes in, a lightweight alternative to these seasoned, but often heavy web servers.

We're going to see how to use Caddy and learn why it is so powerful while using minimal effort on a developer operations side.