Asking ChatGPT to Play a Synthesizer

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I’ve been developing against OpenAI’s chat completion API — the RESTful version of ChatGPT — for a little while and up until now, I’ve avoided learning about the “function calling” feature. Honestly I didn’t quite get it and I didn’t see it as useful to my use cases, but with the announcement of the new…

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Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) Basics

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) Basics

This post is intended to give you a swift kick from behind into a pool of CORS, without taking all day to do so, and without digging into any specific technologies. With that said, let’s learn to swim.   What is CORS? From Mozilla: “Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is an HTTP-header based mechanism that allows…

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Automating Wordle with Cypress and GitHub Actions

Automating Wordle with Cypress and GitHub Actions

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Like many of you, I was introduced to the Wordle craze a few weeks ago by a peer who thought I was too focused on “actual work”. Naturally, I dropped everything to try this new game and then passed a link to the game around to my friends and family like a cursed videotape. It…

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JavaScript Events: An Introduction

JavaScript Events: An Introduction

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Yes, JavaScript Events. Without them, the world wide web would be a dystopian wasteland of static HTML. Without them, we’d still be relying on blink and marquee tags to jazz up our LiveJournals. Fortunately, this is not the case. The modern web runs on JavaScript, and JavaScript is driven by events. But what does it…

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Reflections on “CSS Refactoring” by Steve Lindstrom

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Why I Read This Book I’ve worked in software development professionally for about six years, throughout which much of my time has been spent in front-end web development. In that time, I have written my fair share of CSS and Sass, but I have never felt especially competent while doing so. I can typically style…

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The Case for Strict and Opinionated Style Guides or: The “Because I Said So” Approach

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Developers come and go throughout the life of a project, and they all tend to have their own personal coding nuances. With no style guide, no standardization, no rules, no linter, no style cop, etc., the codebase’s style – or lack-there-of – will inevitably become quite messy. Indeed, “messy” is in the eye of the…

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Azure’s Container Registry with Docker (Quickstart!)

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If you’re wondering how to best leverage your Azure account in the midst of containerizing all your things, then you’re in luck. Azure’s got you covered. In this article, I’m focusing on Azure’s container registry, because I think it will fit into my workflow a little better than other container repositories like Docker Hub. Personally,…

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Dynamically Resizing UITableViewCells in Xamarin.iOS

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I recently needed to implement a UI that required a UITableViewCell to have an expandable “notes” fields within it, with the expansion triggered by a button within the cell itself. Getting this to work was a little tricky. So if you find yourself in this situation, I hope you can get some ideas from me,…

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Unit Testing .NET with JustMock (tips and common pitfalls)

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In this post, I’d like to share a few tips to get up and running with the Telerik mocking framework JustMock, so you can easily and quickly write tests that give you that warm-and-fuzzy feeling you crave from your code. Notes I assume some familiarity with the concepts of unit testing, dependency injection (DI), Inversion…

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Visual Studio Team Services – Triggering A Build From A Build (Using PowerShell)

As of April 2016, Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) does not support triggering a build from another build. This presents a problem if you want your setup to do something like start two builds from a single pull request onto a branch (because VSTS does not support starting multiple builds from one pull request trigger)….

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