TPDP Episode #31: Developer Education through Books, Video Courses, and Conferences

I’m pleased to announce that the 31st episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast, featuring Adrienne Tacke and Alex Ziskind, has published to all of the popular podcast networks.

This episode, titled Developer Education through Books, Video Courses, and Conferences, shares the personal stories of three developers when it comes to how they learn and expand their skill arsenal, as well as how they use their knowledge to produce content for other developers to consume in the format of books and courses.

Adrienne, Alex, and myself share some publishing options and the amount of work that goes into each, with the end goal of honing our skills and helping out other developers.

Test ETag Browser Caching with cURL Requests

Recently I’ve been playing around with Netlify and as a result I’m becoming more familiar with caching strategies commonly found with content delivery networks (CDN). One such strategy makes use of ETag identifiers for web resources.

In short, an ETag identifier is a value, typically a hash, that represents the version of a particular web resource. The resource is cached within the browser along with the ETag value and that value is used when determining if the particular cached resource has changed remotely.

We’re going to explore how to simulate the requests that the browser makes when working with ETag identifiers, but using simple cURL requests instead.

Announcing The Polyglot Developer Courses Portal

I’m pleased to announce that The Polyglot Developer has its own courses portal, a replacement to Udemy and Gumroad!

The new portal, powered by Teachable, is a dedicated area for development courses relating to the material typically found on The Polyglot Developer blog. The portal will contain a variety of courses, some of which are free, and some of which are paid, but all of which are offering a premium learning experience.

I wanted to take a moment to explain what you’ll be able to find in the courses portal and some of the longer term goals of what it hopes to accomplish.

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.

TPDP Episode #30: Building a Developer Community with Meetups

The thirtieth episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast is now available on the popular podcast networks! This episode is titled, Building a Developer Community with Meetups, and it features Vijay Menon, organizer of the JavaScriptLA Meetup group in Los Angeles, California.

Being a part of a developer community, outside of a day job, is important for all developers. Developer communities offer many benefits, some of which include learning about new and modern technologies or expanding your depth of knowledge on seasoned technologies.

Education is only one of the benefits, but Vijay and I explore many in this episode of the podcast, as well as building your own communities.

Execute HTTP Requests in JavaScript Applications

When it comes to modern application development, whether that be web, mobile, or other, there is almost always a need interact with remote web services, generally through HTTP. When working with frameworks such as Angular, Vue, and React, there is baked in functionality for making requests, but what about if you’re using vanilla JavaScript or you’d prefer not to use those built in functionalities?

In this tutorial we’re going to explore a few options towards making HTTP requests in JavaScript. Particularly we’re going to focus on the classic XHR request, using a modern JavaScript Fetch, as well as using a third-party package called Axios.