This article was first posted on the Lunch Badger blog. Check them out if you're working with APIs in Node.js!
Let's imagine a system where you have a few different microservices in your external facing API, each one able to operate independently. Good start! Now we want to allow requests into those microservices from multiple clients - not just our own website. One of the issues you might quickly run into in this scenario is that many clients will want data...
Up until last month, and for a little over a year, I taught new developers in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript at The Iron Yard in Washington, DC - an immersive code school. Of course, teaching people new to the world of software development must necessarily entail teaching a lot more than just writing code. On day 1 we start working in Atom, for example. Any code editor can be a very foreign environment for these folks. But one of the most difficult concepts for my students to understand is...
Okay, first off, this is a loooong blog post. Over 3,500 words... without code examples. Sorry about that, but I wanted it to be relatively complete. There is some high-level navigation directly below that I encourage you to use when you come back later after wasting a few hours here on the first couple sections.
Custom Skills
Skill Definition
Skill Creation (Code)
Testing
Wrap Up and Caveats
Building an Amazon Echo (Alexa) skill is quite...
CSS selector efficiency just isn't that important to me.
That's not to say that efficiency generally isn't... it is. And I take great pride in my ability to determine the most efficient route from my home to work and the most efficient use of my time while preparing meals. However, my computer has eight gigabytes of random access memory and a quad core 2.7 gigahertz processor... As such, the load time of web pages I view is rarely affected by the speed of CSS...
As some of my more dedicated followers might know, in March I left StrongLoop (now part of IBM) after only 14 months with the company. My primary role there was as a developer evangelist which basically means I got to go around to conferences and usergroups speaking about Node.js (read more about that in an earlier post). This was an amazing opportunity and something I had wanted to do for many years. But as much as I love engaging with the Node and JavaScript community around the world...