The Community Contributions of 2019

Last year, in my article titled, The Community Contributions of 2018, I highlighted 11 tutorials that were contributed by the community. To show my appreciation towards the guest contributors on The Polyglot Developer, I wanted to highlight the content that they’ve produced in 2019.

If you found any of the following tutorials valuable, I encourage you to reach out to the author on social media and thank them for taking the time to produce such great content.

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.

Checking for Unchecked Errors within Golang Applications

When it comes to error handling in the Go programming language (Golang), they can either be incredible or a miserable nightmare in terms of management. You can choose to embrace them and check if they are nil every opportunity that you have, or you can ignore them with an underscore. However, what happens in those circumstances where you didn’t even know the function returned something?

Regardless of the story, checking for errors is a good thing, even if you hate doing it. In this tutorial we’re going to see how to scan your code for missed opportunities when it comes to error checking using a nifty open source tool.

Creating an eBook with Pandoc and Markdown

You might already be aware of this, but I’ve accomplished a life achievement of writing and self-publishing two technical eBooks. I published Web Services for the JavaScript Developer, followed by Web Services for the Go Developer, which contain the same concepts using two different programming technologies.

If you’ve ever thought about writing an eBook, you’ve probably opened tools like Apple Pages or Microsoft Word and said to yourself, formatting this is going to be a nightmare. Technical content will, more often than not, contain code, which may have sophisticated formatting. Writing a programming eBook or another technical eBook doesn’t have to be a hassle when you’re using the right tooling.

In this tutorial, we’re going to explore Pandoc, and see how you can write a book quickly and easily with Markdown.

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.

Leaving HERE and Going to MongoDB

About a year ago, I joined HERE Technologies as the Lead Developer Evangelist after having been at Couchbase prior. I wrote about this transition in an article titled, Moving from Couchbase to HERE, the Adventure Continues.

In the year that I’ve been at HERE, I accomplished quite a lot in Developer Relations. Some of those accomplishments include:

• Starting the HERE stream on Twitch.
• Revamping the technical content production strategy for the blog and YouTube channel.
• Improving how feedback is acted on within the organization.

While I did so much more within HERE, this is where my story ends and a new one with MongoDB begins!