Test Password Strength with RegEx in a React Application

While some organizations think it is up to the user to protect themselves by choosing strong usernames and passwords, the developer can help influence good password choices by including it in the design of the application. For example, the developer could include bars, percentages, or colors to help dictate quality of a password as the user enters it into a form.

A lot of us know a weak password is short and contains either alpha or numeric, but never both. We also know strong passwords include symbols as well as variations of character case-sensitivity. So how can we check for these things in the application?

In this tutorial we’re going to make use of regular expressions to test the quality of a password. This is going to be done with simple JavaScript in a React application.

Developing Alexa Skills with MongoDB and Golang

The popularity of Amazon Alexa and virtual assistants in general is no question, huge. Having a web application and mobile application isn’t enough for most organizations anymore, and now you need to start supporting voice operated applications.

So what does it take to create something for Alexa? How different is it from creating a web application?

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to create an Amazon Alexa Skill, also referred to as an Alexa application, that interacts with a MongoDB cluster using the Go programming language (Golang) and AWS Lambda.

Generate Images from HTML with Gulp and Puppeteer

Have you ever needed to generate an image from your HTML? Whether it be for design purposes or for marketing purposes with social media, knowing how to get a screenshot of your HTML design without manually taking the screenshot can be a great thing.

A use-case I was interested in was around feature graphics for each of my blog posts. Sure I could open a graphic design tool like Affinity Photo, or use the same feature graphic for every tutorial, but what if I wanted to automatically generate them based on certain criteria?

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to use Puppeteer to take screenshots of our HTML through a headless Gulp task.

Maps and Location Services with HERE by Example, Released

I’m pleased to announce that a new course has been published, this time on the subject of maps and various location services. This course titled, Maps and Location Services with HERE by Example, focuses on building web applications using JavaScript and products by HERE Technologies.

In this course you’ll see many step by step examples on how to work with interactive maps, geocode and reverse geocode locations, calculate different types of routes, and more.

TPDP E32: Getting Familiar with TypeScript for Development

I’m happy to announce that E32 of The Polyglot Developer Podcast is now available for download!

This episode features Corbin Crutchley, a friend, regular guest, and owner of the blog, Unicorn Utterances. You might remember Corbin from the episode, Asynchronous JavaScript Development, where we focused on promises, callbacks, and a lot of other asynchronous topics in JavaScript. This time around we’re focusing on TypeScript, which is a super-set to JavaScript, and is becoming an increasingly popular development technology.

Continuously Deploy a Hugo Site with GitLab CI

In case you hadn’t heard it on social media, The Polyglot Developer is part of a continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipeline. Rather than using Hugo to manually build the site and then manually copying the files to a DigitalOcean VPS or similar, the Hugo changes are pushed to GitLab and GitLab takes care of the building and pushing.

Now you might be wondering why this is important because the process of manually building and pushing wasn’t so strenuous.

Having your web application as part of a CI / CD pipeline can streamline things that you would have otherwise needed to take into consideration. Here are some examples of where a pipeline would be of benefit, at least in the world of static website generation through tools like Hugo:

• Multiple authors and developers can work on the project without knowing sensitive information like SSH keys.
• Scheduled builds and deployments can be configured for content that is scheduled with a future date.
• Docker images can be automatically created and uploaded to a Docker registry.

Those are just some of the examples, more specifically how things are done on The Polyglot Developer. In this tutorial, we’re going to explore how The Polyglot Developer is doing things and how you can adopt them into your static website generation workflow.

Web Services for the Go Developer, First Edition

I’m pleased to announce that my eBook titled, Web Services for the Go Developer, has been published! This is my second book and was inspired by my previous book with nearly the same name that focused on JavaScript development rather than Go development.

So what is the objective of this book?

It is important for developers to be familiar with web services that follow the GraphQL or REST specification, not only from the perspective of using those web services, but also in designing and developing them. The objective of this book is to teach Go developers, through example, how to do just that.