Category: Web

How to Build and Deploy Machine Learning Models that Scale

Machine learning is the newest tool in the developer’s tool belt but most developers working in the field nowadays don’t know how to deploy and scale machine learning models.

In this article I will describe the two ways I’ve used to deploy machine learning models and why one is better than the other.

But first, let’s talk about how to make your model in the first place.

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Best Sublime Plugins

As you can tell from my lack of articles over the last several months I have been very busy. I’ve been in India and San Francisco working like crazy. I will be posting more about what I have been working on in the future, but because of work I have had no time to write any new or interesting articles.

So today I decided to share what Sublime plugins I use to be more productive, help unify my team’s standards, and help the overall collaboration in my team.

I’ve been using Sublime for several years but I was unimpressed when I first started using it. I later found out that the real advantage of using Sublime is the plugin system. You can make Sublime into nearly any type of IDE you want.

Here is my list of best Sublime plugins.

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ECMAScript 6 has been Approved

In the last several days I have been planning for a multi week work trip to India. In fact I’m writing this on the plane to London as it is the first chance I have had to write anything recently.

ECMAScript 6 has been approved!

It was approved on the 18th of June and brings with it many amazing new features. I’m sure I will be writing more about this in the future.

I’ll be celebrating 2 days late and over the Atlantic, but I will be celebrating none the less.

Cordova and Session Cookies

As of Cordova 5.2.0 on Android 5.1 cookies are working.
I will be investigating other platforms, like iOS, soon.

I’ve talked many times about my love of Cordova. I like how I can use my existing knowledge and code to build a mobile application with additional abilities than a web application. While I know how to a write native Android application, I still prefer to do my initial prototyping and launch in Cordova.

I honestly like everything about Cordova aside from the fact that you can’t use cookie based sessions.

In this post I will show you how to do so in Express 4 using jQuery AJAX calls and some simple code.

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Theme PhoneGap and Cordova for Android Lolipop

I have posted about theming Cordova / PhoneGap to look like native Android before but at the time Android Lolipop and the Material design were not out.

Since then the world of Android has changed a lot. Google has created a new UI design which developers are using to design their applications. It’s nice looking, elegant, and simple.

But I’m not a great mobile developer. I can make Android do pretty much whatever I want, but it takes me substantially longer to write an Android application than it does for me to write a web application. Because of that I like to rapidly prototype my applications in Cordova first and sometimes keep them in Cordova because of the ability to have one codebase that covers multiple platforms.

But web applications always tend to look like web applications and not native.

That is what Materialize is trying to change, and doing a damn good job at.

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HTML5 Is Recommended!!!

It’s time to break out the Champagne and celebrate because today the WC3 has released the fifth major version of the HTML specification and with this specification comes the recommendation from the WC3 to start using HTML5.

While HTML5 has been a specification for years it wasn’t until today that the WC3 has officially told developers to start using it.

By this point most developers and browsers are already supporting HTML5 with minor exceptions when it comes to video and audio support.

I’m honestly very happy that HTML5 is official. Now I just need to wait a bit longer until ECMAScript 6 gets released and all my front end problems will be solved.

Node.js Best Practices

I’ve recently been working on a lot of Node.js projects, for myself, with my students, and for national organizations. Because I’m a University instructor I’ve been getting a lot of questions about what the best practices for Node.js are from every project I’m involved with. I’ve worked with Node.js for years and know all the best practices myself, but I had never seen a list that explained the best practices to my satisfaction. So, I have put one together taking all the best practices agreed on by the community and explaining why each practice is the best way to write Node.js code.

If you want to improve these best practices in any way please don’t hesitate to create a pull request to the GitHub repo.

Here we go.

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Socket.IO Driven, Mongoose like Models with Marilyn

Recently, I have been working a lot with WebSockets, specifically with Socket.IO. As a former ActionScript developer I love being able to return to using events to send and receive data as well as having my application get real time updates from the server. It feels so natural and fits really well into the types of applications I like to build. However, I wanted some more organization. I wanted a library that was designed around CRUD and WebSockets. Something like Mongoose, but on the frontend. I looked all around GitHub and found some libraries that were close, but nothing that was perfect, so I decided to make one myself.

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Theme PhoneGap and Cordova for Android

Cordova is a great platform for building native feeling mobile applications on Android and iOS with web technology like HTML, CSS,
and JavaScript. But what about the getting the native look out of these applications?

Obviously you have to use or write a CSS library which include all the UI components from the Android system and styles the appropriately.

Luckily developers have already created these types of frameworks and today I’m going to explore two of them for making web and Cordova applications look like native Android applications.

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