Got Swagger? (i.e. How I Got My Swagger on and How You Can Too)

Aaron Diffenderfer Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Most developers attempt to ignore and put off documentation as long as possible during the development process. However, the return on investmentย is worth the time and effort — far more than most of us realize.ย This is particularly true with API documentation.ย 

Working with a recent client, I had the opportunity to use Swagger to document APIs and provide structureย around the development process. During daily standups, I may have been known to say that my task for the day was to “get my Swagger on.”ย 

In this post, I want to walk you through my journey with Swagger along with general thoughts, tips, and tricks that I’ve learned along the way so that you too can “get your Swagger on.” Let’s get started…

Getting Started With Angular CLI Commands

Brett Smith Angular, Articles, JavaScript, Programming, Single-Page Application Leave a Comment

A tool that helps the journey of learning Angular is the Angular CLI. The CLI is a useful tool that can help set up and add different elements to your projects. It follows some of the best practices that have been laid down by the Angular team, even handling some of the plumbing for you so that things will work well together.

This post shows some of the basic commands available within the CLI. We will look at some of the basic commands that can help get a project started and built, paying particular attention to the different commands and what they produce, as far as application structure and file layout is concerned…

Creating A Custom Amazon Alexa Skill

Ryan Nguyen .NET, Articles, Azure, Conversational Apps, Programming, Tutorial 1 Comment

With the explosion of the internet of things (IoT), many companies are competing to create the best smart home ecosystem for consumers.

Amazon Echo, for instance, is a robust system that allows the user to interact with their smart devices via voice command. Alexa is the application that the Echo communicates with, essentially the brain of the Amazon Echo. It controls how your Amazon Echo communicates with your other smart devices and services. It can sync with a variety of smart devices including switches, thermostats, garage doors, sprinklers, door locks, music streamers, news outlets, and more. It alsoย allows the third-party companies to create custom skills which are then accessible through the Amazon Echo.

In this blog I willย discuss the Amazon Echo and its Alexa application. We will go through the process to create a custom Alexa skill about the Keyhole blog, paying particular attention to keywords you’ll need to understand when you create your own Skill. From there, we’ll show how to test a Skill via simulators and deploy it to your Amazon Echo.

Cobol to Java

Adventures In Modernization: Strategy + Example Converting COBOL To Java

Dallas Monson Articles, COBOL, Consulting, Development Technologies & Tools, DevOps, Java, Keyhole Creations, Modernization, Programming, Tutorial Leave a Comment

We have consultants who specialize in moving old to new, renovating dilapidated code bases, and designing brighter futures for enterprises who have been vendor-locked for most of their existence. We have come across some repeated patterns and strategies for how to approach modernization of legacy systems. In this blog, we will cover a strategy that is very popular right now, Re-Platforming.

The basic flow of this post will be:

Introduction to Modernization
High-level definition of the Re-Platforming Strategy for Modernization
Sample of Re-Platforming using Keyhole Syntax Tree Transformer, COBOL –> Java
Additional thoughts on the value/risk of this strategy

Let’s get started…

Coding For Fun: MIT Battlecode Challenge 2017

Joshua Robinson Articles, Community, Development Technologies & Tools, Educational Event, Programming Leave a Comment

I recently participated in the month-long MIT Battlecode competition where I programmed a team of virtual robots that competed against another team in a real-time strategy game. In this blog, I discuss some of the lessons learned during the programming competition. I was surprised how much of it could be used as a lesson in the real-world of programming!

Weโ€™re in this industry because we love programming and writing code. It is in this spirit that I suggest to all readers to consider challenging yourself and doing something similar to โ€œcode for funโ€ and improve your skills!