Raymond is an experienced developer evangelist and advocate. He focuses on APIs, AI, the web platform, and enterprise cat demos.

Latest Posts

Creating Images with Generative AI via Conversation

Last week, I blogged about updates to Google's Gemini APIs in regards to image generation. That post detailed how there are now two models for generating images with the experimental Gemini Flash model having a nice free tier. One of the interesting features of the API is the ability to edit existing images, in other words, pass an image to Gemini and via a prompt, have Gemini update it. I thought it would be kind of fun to see if I could build a 'chat' interface for this model, one where you could simply talk to Gemini and have it work on your image along with you.

BoxLang Quick Tips - PDF Generation

Today's BoxLang quick tip is one near and dear to my heart, generating PDFs. Creating dynamic, expressive PDFs is fairly easy. Let me show you how. As before, I've got a video version as well so you would rather watch that, just skip to the end.

Watch me suffer with React more in tomorrow's Code Break!

So my last Code Break was... painful. My experience trying to learn React did not go well. Because of that I thought strongly about giving up, but what fun would that be? Join me tomorrow (March 18th) at 12PM CST where I'll, once again, try to learn some basic React features and get a trivial web site built. Will I make it? Probably not! But you can come join me and cheer/heckle me on! I hope to see you there:

Building a Jira Search Tool in BoxLang

Developers seem to have a love/hate (or perhaps hate/despise) relationship with Jira. I've never minded it, but the biggest issue for me is that if I haven't used it in a while, it can be overwhelming. Yesterday I was thinking about this and wondering if perhaps I could build my own tooling to interact with Jira via an API, if it even had one. Turns out, of course they have an API and it's not terribly difficult to use. With that in mind, I whipped up a quick tool to search Jira via the command line with BoxLang.

BoxLang Quick Tips - Database Access

Today I'm kicking off a new blog/video series of quick tips for people interested in BoxLang. These 'quick tips' are just that, a look at how BoxLang can simplify working with the JVM and building CLI scripts, web apps, and serverless applications. Each of these posts will include a video along with sample code and help highlight some of the ways BoxLang can be powerful in just a few lines of code.

Automating and Responding to Sentiment Analysis with Diffbot's Knowledge Graph

Diffbot's Knowledge Graph has a simple purpose - bring the sum total of all knowledge to your fingertips via a search that emphasis data and relations over a simple text based search engine experience. Sourced by the entire web, Knowledge Graph lets you perform complex queries against billions of data points instantly via a simple API. I decided to take a spin with their API and build a "relatively" simple tool - news analysis for a product run in on automated platform. Should be easy, right? Let's get to it. Note that the examples in this blog post assume you've gotten a free key from Diffbot. Be sure to do that before trying the samples.

Want more posts? You can peruse a complete list of my content, or pop over to my search page to find what you're looking for.