Mermaid: Helping Documentation Catch Up with Development

Brian Buchta Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming 1 Comment

Documentation is an integral part of any development process and can take significant time and effort to write. Additionally, even if we write quality documentation, oftentimes it fails to evolve as development best practices change and can quickly become outdated. Mermaid aims to fix this so-called โ€œDoc-Rotโ€ by creating a quick and easy way to create detailed diagrams that can evolve alongside code development.

Today, we will be going over Mermaid and, more specifically, how it can be used to both create and maintain complex documentation using diagrams.

Using Terraform to Create a Cloud Function on Google Cloud Platform

James Fielder Architecture, Articles, Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, Infrastructure As Code (IaC) 1 Comment

Attention: This article was published over 2 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. While some topics are evergreen, technology moves fast, so please keep that in mind as you read the post.In this post, we will walk through using Terraform to create a Google Cloud function that triggers when a file is uploaded and outputs …

Introduction to Web Apps with Next.js

Introduction to Web Apps with Next.js

Bob Palmer Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, React 1 Comment

In this post, I am going to demonstrate how to set up a simple Next.js web application. Next.js is a heavily opinionated JavaScript framework, in that it has a lot of conventions and recommended tools built into its design.

We’ll use Next.js version 14.2.2 to set up the groundwork for a simple web application. By “web application,” I mean an application that is designed primarily to collect input from a user in a web browser and return some output generated from that input.

Navi-A-Cheatsheet-for-CLI

Navi: A โ€œCheatsheetโ€ CLI

Jake Everhart Articles, Programming Leave a Comment

The command line is a powerful tool in software development. Regardless of whether you are comfortable working within a shell or if you prefer a GUI, there are likely scenarios that still require you to open a terminal and type out some commands.

This should not surprise us โ€“ many tools solely support Command-Line Interface (CLI) interaction โ€“ but over time, the efforts required to keep track of each new commandโ€™s syntax can add up. If youโ€™re anything like me, you might memorize only the commands that you use most frequently, resigning yourself to searching through documentation for the rest whenever you need them….

Can AI Write Code

Can AI Write Code Now?

Joel Buckingham Articles, Artificial Intelligence, Development Technologies & Tools Leave a Comment

The topic of AI seems to be everywhere lately. At this point, I’ve consumed many hours of content regarding what it is and how it’s going to change the worldโ€ฆ whether we want it to or not. However, I havenโ€™t actually developed much code with it.

I’ve been writing code in some form since the early 2000s, but I have almost no practical experience with AI as used for development. Sure, I understand the basics, and I have a personal subscription to Chat GPT. But besides a couple of fun pictures that I’ve created of two of my past dogs that were never alive at the same time, I’ve not had much experience using it for code.

In this article, I’m going to test Chat GPT to see how much I can accomplish while writing as little actual code as possible.