Category: Software Engineering

In part one of this series, we discussed building a small app that checks whether Target has any Xbox Series Xs in stock. Our plan is to do this using Puppeteer and automating the usage of Chrome to open the appropriate web page. In part 2, we will extend the previous code to send an…

Since the new Xbox Series X launch last year, it has been almost impossible to get your hands on one. It is continually out of stock at all the major retailers. To check if it is in stock, we typically visit a retailer’s website. But we don’t want to go and check every day or,…

I am a big fan of eggs. My lunch probably includes two to three eggs almost every day – usually in omelet form, but sometimes in an egg sandwich. I have done many different egg experiments (or eggsperiments, as I like to call them) over the last year. Most of my eggsperiments have tended toward…

In Part 2 of my Parbaked series, I showed some code capable of creating forms from data without writing any code. And since it is just written in Angular, if you do need to customize it, you can. As I have covered in my past two Parbaked posts, parbaking is a concept where bread is…

The Angular Router is a powerful tool in our Angular toolbox. Part of the Angular Router is guards. When guards are configured, they can be used to block access to individual routes within our Angular SPA. Think of it as a way to prevent users from viewing specific screens within the client-side application. This guard…

As I covered in my introductory post, parbaking is a concept where bread is baked to 80% of completion and then stopped. The remaining 20% is then finished where the bread will be sold. In many cases, this is a grocery store that wants to offer fresh bread but doesn’t have the staff required to…

If you’re into baking, you may have heard of parbaked bread. This is where you bake your bread to about 80% done and then rapidly freeze it for transportation or storage. When you finally need your bread, you complete that remaining 20% of baking. Parbaking is how many grocery stores can have fresh-baked bread without…

In the first part of this series, we created a knowledge base for our chatbot. Now it’s time to consume that knowledge base. When we’re done, the chatbot can be hosted on a variety of solutions and ways. For example, we could embed it within Microsoft Teams, GroupMe, or Facebook. But for now, we will…

Given that you want to create a QnA-style chat, then Azure has a solution for you. Chatbots are becoming more and more common, but building one from scratch seems terribly complicated. Just the natural language processing alone would be a monumental task. And when you are creating a chatbot, you probably don’t want to become…