Good day my fabulous readers and I hope all is well with you. I just got back from speaking at the excellent Devnexus event and despite some travel issues (thank you storms, really), I had a great time. I got to see not one, not two, but three very old friends of mine and attended some good sessions as well. I'm home for a week and then on the road again to the Adobe ColdFusion Summit in the DC area. Don't forget, this Tuesday I've got another episode of <Code><Br> coming up. I'll be building, or attempting to, build a PWA live. Surely it will go perfectly, right? Pretty Console Ta ..read more

A few weeks back I wrote up my experience with generative AI as a dungeon master. That post ended up being really popular and got me thinking about other ways I could integrate D & D, or other games, with Generative AI. With Gemini 1.5 now available via API, I thought it would be good to find an excuse to hit the API in a demo. So with that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to the Class Suggester. The Application # The app begins by simply presenting some introductory text and invites you to click a button to roll for your stats. You can hit the Roll Stats button as many times as you wan ..read more

For some time now, I've relied on my Netlify Analytics report to keep track of how well my site is doing, what content is popular, and so forth. I was a Google Analytics user for over ten years, but when they updated the UI, I saw red every time I tried to use it. Netlify Analytics is super simple and quick. (My only real complaint is that it's limited to 30 days, but I've got free access to the feature so I'm happy to not care about that.) I complement Netlify Analytics with GoatCounter as well. Netify's analytics show much more traffic than Goat, and I figure the truth is somewhere in the mi ..read more

My regular readers (hello, yall rock!) know I've been playing with generative AI the past few months. I'm still a bit skeptical about the amount of hype involved around the space, but I'm slowly getting more excited as I see some of the interesting possibilities available with these tools. Most of my recent exploration has been on the Google Gemini side, but after hearing my buddy Todd Sharp talk about Amazon Bedrock on his stream yesterday, I figured it was time to check it out. (FYI, you should absolutely check out his weekly Twitch show on the AWS Twitch channel called "Streaming on Streami ..read more

Yesterday I introduced you to Adobe's new offering, Firefly Services, and demonstrated a simple example of how to generate images from prompt using the REST APIs. Today I thought I'd share one of the little demos I've made with the API, and one specifically built to help out with my blog - generating headers. My usual process for headers is to go to the Firefly website, enter a prompt, let it load, and then promptly change it to landscape and re-generate my prompt again. I always feel bad that the initial, square, images are essentially trashed. It occurred to me I could build a Node.js utilit ..read more

Adobe Summit is currently happening in Vegas and while there's a lot of cool stuff being announced, I'm most excited about the launch of Firefly Services. This suite of APIs encompasses the Photoshop and Lightroom APIs I've discussed before, as well as a whole new suite of APIs for Firefly itself. Best of all, the APIs are dang easy to use. I've been building demos and samples over the past few weeks, and while I'm obviously biased, they're truly a pleasure to use. Before I go further, do know that while the docs and such are all out in the open, there isn't a free trial. Yet. Basics # First ..read more

I enjoy building API demos so I generally keep an eye out for interesting APIs to play with. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I had not seen anyone talking about or sharing information about Spam APIs. I may be showing my age a bit, but it feels like spam was a much larger issue back in the early days. It was something you always heard about and worried about but not so much anymore. Much like nuclear war. I did a bit of digging and it turns out Chris Coyler had similar thoughts 4 years ago: "Spam Detection APIs". I thought I'd check out a few myself and share the results. Here, in no p ..read more

Back in February Google announced Gemini 1.5, their latest, most powerful language model, and while access has been open via AI Studio, API access has only been available in the past few days. I thought I'd try out the new model and specifically make use of the larger context window to do prompts on PDF documents. I discussed something similar earlier this year(("Using AI and PDF Services to Automate Document Summaries")[https://www.raymondcamden.com/2024/01/08/using-ai-and-pdf-services-to-automate-document-summaries]) which made use of Diffbot, so I thought it would be interesting to build a ..read more

I've been using Node.js on the regular now for probably over a decade, but one thing I've never done well is keep up to date with its features and new additions. In general, my brain just thinks "use javascript" and that's all. The last time I really cared about what precisely was supported was when I was using fetch in client-side JavaScript and it wasn't supported natively in Node. Luckily I could just use node-fetch and be done with it. That being said, I recognize I've not done a great job of keeping track of updates to Node itself so I try to notice it when folks mention it. Over the past ..read more

Good morning. I managed to tear myself away from Assasin's Creed Valhalla a bit to get out a "Links For You" post. I was supposed to do this last week (my schedule is every two weeks), but I must have forgotten. Or just been busy. Life happens, amiright??!?! Next month will be pretty busy as well. I've got two conferences I'll be speaking at, a birthday, and just normal life stuff as well. As a reminder, if you find these posts, and this blog handy, I've got multiple ways you can show your support. With my birthday coming up, you could always visit my Amazon wishlist, or become a patron (I'd u ..read more