I heard good things about Amazon Polly and wanted to take a peek and judge for myself. It’s very easy to use. The example below were done with the AWS CLI.

In case you’re not familiar, Polly is a text to speech service created by Amazon for AWS. Learn more at https://aws.amazon.com/polly/

At work I selected GraphCMS to be our preferred headless CMS. It is already leveraged on multiple projects and has been working out well for us. The beauty of a good headless CMS is you can use in many scenarios. Case in point, of the 3 instances we have, 2 are web apps; only one is marketing site.

Cobra is a library and generation tool for creating command line interfaces. It simplifies the work needed to create a good CLI. It is written in Go and is used in quite a few well know open source projects. Docker, Kubernetes, Etcd and the GitHub CLI all use Cobra. Check out this link for a larger list of projects.

Running your code in containers is a great way manage and deploy software. All of the code needed to run your app is inside one or more containers. You can move these containers from environment to enviornment by creating images and running these images in each environment (as containers).

Golang is a hot topic among developers these days.  languages like Golang and node.js are getting a lot of attention.

For most folks switching programing languages is a big deal and it usually takes some production catastrophe or poorly aging codebase to motivate the switch.  It’s like when someone has that way too special night with tequila and decides “never again.”  For others they switch and/or experiment with other languages like they change their socks.

I recently moderated a panel called Scaling your business with technology at Silicon Beach Fest.

I want to thank all the panelists for coming and giving the crowd their tech insights. We had a good discussion across a breadth of issues, from stacks, to clouds to testing and product iterations. I would also like to thank all the folks who came to watch the panel and ask questions.

After a few years of developing Erdiko I have learned a few things about what it does well and what other frameworks do better.  The PHP language has also changed dramatically since I started Erdiko in 2012.   This has lead to a coming to jesus moment where it was clear it’s time for a new architecture.

A few months back I wrote about headless WordPress on the Arroyo Labs blog, http://blog.arroyolabs.com/2016/02/headless-wordpress-a-primer/

Since then I have made a bunch of improvements to the package on github.  Take a look and let me know what you think.  We’ll continue to make improvements to the code to make working with WordPress that much easier.  https://github.com/ArroyoLabs/erdiko-wordpress

Our lead developer at Arroyo Labs has put together a couple of posts to introduce developers to Angular 2 by comparing it to Angular 1.

I am new to MongoDB but this book has been helpful in evaluating and learning about how to scale with it. At work we’ve been thinking about using it for some projects but it was important to investigate and review it in more detail before we jumped into it and added it to our stack. Overall, it’s a great book on Mongo scaling, succinct and complete. It doesn’t elaborate on every possible scaling topic, but it’s enough detail to make important architectural decisions. Mongo is a great new technology, and this book is a good companion. For more info on using mongo in general, check out “MongoDB: The Definitive Guide.”

If you came to this site in the last month or two you might have noticed some weird things happening.  You look at a post and then you are redirected to some random site trying to sell you something.  Turns out I got hit by a hacker targeting WordPress on Media Temple.  Almost 1/4 of all WordPress blogs on my host got hacked..lucky me!  If you are running WordPress don’t forget to keep up with security updates and keep your server perms in check.  I haven’t posted on johnarroyo.com for months because of work, but that also meant I hadn’t properly updated my WordPress installation in a while either.

If you are using a mac or PC and want to add Vorbis (*.ogg) and FLAC (*.flac) playback to iTunes and Quicktime then these two apps are very handy. I just recently installed them and they work great. Fluke is used to add FLAC playback and XiphQT is used to add Vorbis playback. Instructions to install and use these apps are included on the Fluke and XiphQT websites.

This is a good article on Reason 4 with some tips on how to take advantage of the new features and sound quality updates. I’m using 3 about to switch to 4 and found this simple article useful. Read it here.