Author: Chad Michel
Getting Started with LM Studio
Many large language models (LLMs) provide features similar to ChatGPT. These custom models offer several benefits. For example, you can host them yourself, which could benefit some projects and environments. And there are models tuned for particular use cases, like coding or text processing. And then, some models are great for providing chatbot experiences in…
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Using AWS Cognito with Google Authentication
Adding social authentication to your application should be pretty simple. And if you started with AWS Cognito, adding something like Google authentication is straightforward. In this post, we will add Google authentication to an existing AWS Cognito User Pool. To configure your Google identity provider, we will need Client ID, a Client Secret, and an…
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How to Upload to Azure Blob Storage Using NodeJS
When building modern cloud applications, we usually need to store some files in the cloud. It could be images uploaded by users or CSV files generated by the application. In this blog post, I will show you how to upload files to Azure Blob Storage. First, install the storage-blob npm package. npm install @azure/storage-blob After…
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Quick Look – Konva
I needed a JS library to support annotating on top of images. We wanted the ability to markup images in a web application. I tried a few different frameworks and libraries to achieve this goal, but most didn’t work out. After much searching, I found Konva. Konva is a simple JS library, but it works well,…
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Building Angular Applications Using GitHub Actions
Angular is a very popular web application framework. From a web framework perspective, it is probably the most complete and, in my opinion, a very useable framework. I can see why some have issues with it, but it is very okay, which is probably the best thing to be said about any framework. At Don’t…
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Quick Look – Ionic Start Wizard
We have used Ionic for quite a few projects here at Don’t Panic Labs. It has worked in many situations when we want a mobile application but don’t want to build it as a fully native app. You can quickly create an Ionic application by running the Ionic CLI command: Ionic start When running that…
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What I’m Excited to See in .NET 8
.NET has evolved a lot since I first started using it years ago. I was introduced to it when it was released in 2002, but I wasn’t using it regularly until I started working at a new company in 2005. Microsoft recently announced the availability of .NET 8. This version of .NET is a Long…
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Building a Chat System Without Azure Chat – Part 1
In a previous blog post series, we built an entire chat system on top of Azure Communication Services. We focused on a lot of the details in building the system using Azure Chat. While Azure Chat helps solve a lot of the problems with these kinds of projects, it still took a lot of effort…
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Getting Started with OAuth2 Authentication
Authentication is a big and scary topic in the world of software development, but it doesn’t have to be. OAuth with PKCE (Proof Key for Code Exchange) is easy to implement. OAuth is short for “Open Authorization”. It is a common way to access data on the web. You often encounter OAuth when you sign…
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RIP Visual Studio for Mac
Visual Studio Mac is dead or will be 8/31/2024. This probably doesn’t affect many of you, but this is an interesting turn of events. Visual Studio Mac has a fascinating lineage. Microsoft created .NET years ago (2001), and alongside .NET an open-source alternative was created (Mono). Developers needed an alternative editor, which begot SharpDevelop. And…
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