Tracy Developer Meetup in California

After having thought about it for quite some time, I’ve finally decided to start a developer user group in my home town of Tracy, California. This group titled, The Tracy Developer Meetup, was started to give developers living outside of the Bay Area, a chance to collaborate with other developers in the same position.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tracy, it is a town about 1.5 hours from San Francisco and Mountain View, but significantly more affordable and home to many engineers that commute to the Bay Area for work.

Use Angular To Create A Cross-Platform Stellar XLM Desktop Wallet

With Android and iOS so obtainable and development so easy, people often forget the importance of desktop applications. I have a phone and tablet, but I depend on my desktop applications much more. However, the development of these applications are not difficult.

With frameworks like Electron, developers can create cross-platform desktop applications with JavaScript and HTML. Take the example I wrote about previously in the article titled, Create a Cross-Platform Desktop DigiByte DGB Wallet with Angular and Electron. I demonstrated how to leverage a very popular framework to create a cryptocurrency wallet.

DigiByte isn’t the only popular blockchain on the internet. I’ve also been looking into Stellar because of all the buzz it has been receiving from popular companies like Stripe.

We’re going to see how to create a Stellar XLM wallet for Mac, Windows, and Linux using Angular and Electron.

Create An Email Subscription Popup With jQuery

As you’ll recall, The Polyglot Developer was once using WordPress. Back when I was using WordPress, I was using a plugin called Icegram, which is similar to SumoMe and OptinMonster, but it allowed me to present popups after a period of time to prompt users to subscribe to my newsletter.

I get that not everyone appreciates an annoying popup, but it was great for me because I was getting a lot of new email subscribers very quickly.

Since having dropped WordPress, I haven’t been able to find a plugin that offered similar functionality to what I had. This inspired me to create my own plugin using jQuery that I could use anywhere, including my Hugo powered blog. We’re going to see how to create our own opt-in style popup for collecting email leads.

Scan For BLE iBeacon Devices With Golang On A Raspberry Pi Zero W

Last year I had worked on an interesting project at my day job, Couchbase, where I scanned for BLE iBeacon devices from a few Raspberry Pi IoT devices and uploaded the information to a remote server for analysis. I wrote about this experiment in an article titled, Collecting iBeacon Data with Couchbase and Raspberry Pi IoT Devices.

My first attempt at scanning and analyzing iBeacon data was done with Java and Node.js. The Raspberry Pi devices were using Java, and the data was being offloaded to a Node.js server. The problem with this is that Java is too heavy for the low spec Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Fast forward to round two of playing with iBeacon devices and a Raspberry Pi. We’re going to see how to use Golang to scan for BLE signals and parse the data to determine if they are iBeacon.

Create Paper Wallets For Stellar XLM Coins With Angular

Continuing down my adventure of learning about and investing in various cryptocurrencies, I thought I’d explore Stellar, which is what I understand to be, a competitor to Ripple. If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll remember that I had written about creating a Ripple XRP paper wallet in a tutorial titled, Generate Cold Storage Paper Wallets for Ripple XRP Coins with Angular.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to accomplish the same task of generating a cold storage paper wallet with Angular, but this time we’ll be doing it for Stellar XLM coins.

TPDP Episode #16: Job Hunting As A Software Engineer

Job hunting can be one of the most time and energy consuming tasks we have to do. Unfortunately there isn’t a perfect formula but some tips could definitely help to alleviate the process or at least know that you are not alone.

In the following article I will try to provide you with some tips and tricks when applying and preparing for a job interview as a Software Engineer. There is a lot of information on the web but I will try to sum up the areas you should be focusing on and point you to some helpful websites.

Use Chart.js To Display Attractive Charts In A Vue.js Web Application

Charts are a great way to illustrate data within an application. No one likes trying to make sense of raw data or looking at it via a table. Instead a nice bar chart or line graph can paint a perfect picture of what’s going on.

There are a lot of charting libraries available, but my personal favorite is Chart.js. It is a vanilla JavaScript library, so including it within a framework can be a little intimidating.

We’re going to see how to work with Chart.js within a project that uses the Vue.js JavaScript framework.