TPDP E37: Writing Tests in a Development Project

I’m pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast has been published!

In Writing Tests in a Development Project, the topic is testing and it features repeat guest Corbin Crutchley, author and co-founder at Unicorn Utterances.

Writing tests can often feel overwhelming, or a chore, and it prevents a lot of developers from including them when developing, but the goal of the episode is to break things down and make it easier to understand and implement.

If you’ve been curious about the different types of tests to include in the development process, whether that be unit tests, integration tests, end to end tests, or something else, this is the podcast episode for you.

Location Geofencing with MongoDB, Stitch, and Mapbox

For a lot of organizations, when it comes to location, geofencing is often a very desirable or required feature. In case you’re unfamiliar, a geofence can be thought of as a virtual perimeter for a geographic area. Often, you’ll want to know when something enters or exits that geofence so that you can apply your own business logic. Such logic might include sending a notification or updating something in your database.

MongoDB supports GeoJSON data and offers quite a few operators that make working the location data easy.

When it comes to geofencing, why would you want to use a database like MongoDB rather than defining boundaries directly within your client-facing application? Sure, it might be easy to define and manage one or two boundaries, but when you’re working at scale, checking to see if something has exited or entered one of many boundaries could be a hassle.

In this tutorial, we’re going to explore the $near and $geoIntersects operators within MongoDB to define geofences and see if we’re within the fences. For the visual aspect of things, we’re going to make use of Mapbox for showing our geofences and our location.

Boost the Performance of OBS Twitch Streams on Mac and Windows

So you’ve decided that you want to start streaming content to Twitch, YouTube, or similar. When I say streaming, I mean live streaming, not publishing pre-recorded videos to be watched on-demand. Streaming is so popular that you might think it’s as easy as opening your web camera and clicking stream. The reality is that there’s a little more to it, more so around stream quality and performance.

Take my stream for example. I stream a few times per month on Twitch using The Polyglot Developer. The first few streams had a large amount of framerate stuttering, audio and video synchronization issues, and computers sounding like airplane jet engines. I was able to resolve these problems by changing the way I streamed with Open Broadcast Studio (OBS).

In this tutorial, I’m going to walk you through some of the things that can be improved in Open Broadcast Studio to give you better stream performance on the popular content streaming networks.

TPDP Episode #36: Machine Learning, AI, and Data Science

The latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast, episode thirty-six featuring Upkar Lidder from IBM, can be found on all of the major podcast networks, including, but not limited to, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

In this episode titled, Machine Learning, AI, and Data Science, Upkar and myself explore what people mean when they talk about machine learning as well as when and how it should be implemented in your own projects.

TPDP Episode #35: Developing on the Blockchain

I’m pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast has been published to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and pretty much every other major podcasting networking that exists.

The topic of this episode, Developing on the Blockchain, is the blockchain, and I’m joined by expert Lennart Frantzell from IBM to help walk us through everything you should know when it comes to developing on it.

If you’re interested in cryptocurrency, this episode is not for you. Instead, we’re exploring what the blockchain is, why people are developing on it, and how you can start developing your next application on it as well.

Live Stream with Guests Using OBS with Skype and NDI

As a technical content streamer, one of the most difficult tasks for me to accomplish was with having guests participate on the stream. To be clear, I don’t mean having guests participate in the chat, I mean having them on the stream with their video, audio, and sometimes screen.

Think about it. You’re streaming to Twitch or another platform using Open Broadcast Studio (OBS). You’re probably streaming your video and audio, but what happens if you need to include a guest? Do you do a Zoom meeting and screen-grab their video using OBS? If you’re capturing the guest video, how do you pipe their audio? What happens if they need to share their screen as well?

This can turn into a complicated mess.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to have guests on your stream without a bunch of complicated hacks. We’re going to see how to use a network device interface (NDI) with Skype for easy inclusion into Open Broadcast Studio.

Static Website Deployments to MongoDB Stitch with Hugo, Git, and Travis CI

MongoDB Stitch can do quite a few things, some of which include GraphQL, functions as a service, and triggers. However, another awesome feature is in its ability to host static HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, the core components to any static website.

Static websites are becoming more popular due to their performance and how inexpensive it is to host them at scale. Popular generators include Hugo, Jekyll, 11ty, because of how easy it is to write and maintain in a format like Markdown and convert to HTML.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to create a static hosted website using Hugo and automatically deploy changes to Stitch through a continuos deployment pipeline consisting of Git and Travis CI.