Tony is a Geek

Thoughtful article: https://towardsdatascience.com/will-gpt-3-kill-coding-630e4518c04d I guess these people were not around when the whole "4GL is going to take over the world" commotion was going on in the late 90s & fading out in the early 2000's. What's a 4GL? a 4th generation language. It was meant to be procedural and "program-generating" software.   It was meant to be so simple that if someone could use M$oft Excel, they could build an application without the need for those pesky expensive programmers. Whilst this was okay for outputting boilerplate / templated code that created generic and bland / functional applications they did feel a little bit "soul less'.  That's an interesting choice of words I use there.  How can code or an app have a "soul".  Well, it can't, it will have the representation of the artists (programmers) personality expressing what the end user would like to use.  Some people like to drive boring ca...

Not an exhaustive list, but a very good one to skim through..... If you take nothing extra away from this, at least the ` NODE_ENV=production ` should be applied (3 times faster running) CHECK IT OUT HERE

If you've heard about StrongLoop or IBM API Connect or the new API economy and fancy having a go yourself, follow my guide to getting started. CLICK HERE FOR AN INTRO & WALK-THROUGH

This year, I think I shall be mostly MQTT-ing.... BLUEMIX seems to be a central element in this equation  :-) After checking through some "old code", I wrote my own MQTT back in 2006...but got distracted and moved onto working on other things (I think it was called a "PassThru Server" or something as catchily named as that - I'll see if I can find the images/docs later) - sigh...but then again I was working for Sybase/iAnywhere at the time, so it would have get buried inside SAP by now...

I've been meaning to upload this for a while now.  Today, I'll finally get around to it, mainly for my own reference, but also to possibly help other people out. The scenario: 1) You are asked to make a demo application... 2) ...in as short a time as possible... 3) ...in a pressured environment... 4) ...did I mention "they" want it all finished 2hours before you even started You get the picture.  Nowadays, just because we have Design thinking and wonderful ways of quizzing a business user on how they feel and what they want a Mobile application to do and using all the Agile techniques you can throw at a buzzword bingo board, it still comes down to the basic element.  A coder, then has to code something and writing code takes time. I totally agree that making a prototype / mockup / wireframe app can be simple / easy / quick, but making a "real" application is not so, as there is so much more that you have to construct. Now, in previous coder w...

Node Red Programming Guide! Do you want to get started programming Node-Red?  If so CHECK OUT THESE LECTURES. The Node RED programming Guide is a series of lectures designed to introduce you to Node-RED - the new visual programming tool for the IoT. It will take you from the basics right through to advanced Node-RED programming. It is targeted at two types of readers - those who are new to the IoT and want to quickly prototype IoT applications and those who are already familiar with the IoT who want to understand Node-RED. The guide is structured into three sections, sections 1 (Lectures 1-4) introduces Node-RED and walks through a series of examples to explain its programming model, its basic nodes/features and how it can be used to access a variety of real world data sources. We use a hosted cloud based version of Node-RED so that readers don't have to worry about the details of installing and managing Node-RED. Section 2 (Lectures 5-7) explores in more detail Node-RED...

Ever wanted to build a robot?  Of course you have!  You could just " buy " one pre-done and job done, but where's the fun in that? I was thinking..... robot interest flared at the end of the 90s and early 2000s but like the mobile industry it took a bit of a nosedive afterwards, just like the mobile industry.  The technology has now moved on leaps and bounds, what would be involved in building a robot that you could just bolt together and write a little bit of C code for? Back in the day( late 80's ), I got a GCSE in electronics, it interested me, but it was too low level.  I learnt the colour coding of resistors, making PCB boards, etc... but I'm a developer, not an engineer.  I don't " make " widgets, I " use " widgets to get a job done.  It took a few years for me to realise that. Keeping that in mind, now that the Arduino has matured and the Arduino Shields have come on a long way, these have now become " widgets " tha...

Whilst building my ACE! app - I needed to be able to upload images for the events / presentations / speakers and attendees. I thought, hey, that's simple, we've been doing this on normal web-servers for decades, I'll just write a server-side php page (a couple of lines of code) that saves the posted files to a folder and then I'll know the URL to reference them.  Sorted! I should have it all finished before the kettle has finished boiling for my cup of tea. Then I pondered for a bit.  How does this now work in the PaaS world (Clouds like IBM Bluemix, Google AppEngine, Amazon, that Microsoft one, etc...).  Ah, not such a simple solution now.  But a challenge.  Whilst drinking my cup of tea, I then set about making this work on IBM Bluemix. Here's a Slides.com presentation of how I made this work for me:

It's time to get to know socket.io too..... should keep me busy for a week or so.

I spent a little bit of time, okay, probably more time that I should have done... making a sample application that would teach me how to use IBM Worklight v6.2, AngularJS, NodeJS, ExpressJS and MongoDB . After enjoying the ride, I thought, hey, I can't be the only one... there are probably other people that would benefit from knowing how this stuff connects together, so I documented the sample in a series of pages and screenshots. As I say, I have a list of v2.0 changes as long as my arm, but I decided to stop now, do a write up and then move onto v2.0 afterwards.   I hope this helps out anyone else wanting to create a Worklight v6.2 mobile app that uses AngularJS and JSONStore and the Worklight Adapters to retrieve and post data. GET STARTED with the ARTICLE here Download the Project Source code here Download the MongoDB source here (just import using RockMongo) v1.1 is now available - checkout the improvements in this post (new UI framework used: Ionic)

MEAN app v1 The start of the journey of making a MEAN app and then evolving it to be mobile and offline (mobile and offline, what have I done? gone back 10+years to AvantGo days?!)

oh no, not another raspberry-pi setup article Actually, no it's not, it's just a reference for me to rebuild my Pi if the SD card ever gets corrupted.