Chris Mendez (Page 1)

Tools for App Makers

Tools for App Makers

In order to build websites, apps or API's, every developer ultimately ends up curating a suite of tools that can help them build products better, cheaper and faster. Below are a few tools that I use all the time. API Development * Postman [https://www.getpostman.com/] - Google Chrome plug-in

Radio: Preparing WAV files for cloud-based radio

Radio: Preparing WAV files for cloud-based radio

The team at USC Radio Labs [http://www.uscradiogroup.org/labs] has been working to solve a pretty exciting problem: converting 60k+ audio files from WAV format to something more internet-ready. For context, in the 1990s, many radio stations started moving towards automating their music programming. The benefits were clear:

Radio: Prepare your podcast for iTunes distribution using AWS Elastic Transcoder

Amazon Web Services offers a suite of tools for podcast producers to distribute their audio online. There's CloudFront for caching, S3 for storage, Glacier for long-term storage, Elemental for real-time distributing, Tailor for server-side ad insertion. I thought it would be to fun to show how to use Elastic Transcoder

How to get a 30s preview from Apple's API

How to get a 30s preview from Apple's API

How to get 30 second previews of music using Apple's API.

How to publish an Mp3 to Icecast using NodeJS (Part 2 of 2)

How to publish an Mp3 to Icecast using NodeJS (Part 2 of 2)

How to publish an MP3 to Icecast for syndication using NodeJS.

Statistics: Calculating Mean, Median, Mode, Standard Deviation using Ruby, R, or Javascript

Statistics: Calculating Mean, Median, Mode, Standard Deviation using Ruby, R, or Javascript

Unsure what is mean median and mode? Here's how to find mean, median, mode and standard deviation using Ruby, R, and Javascript.

AWS: How to create your first Alexa skill

How to create your first Alexa skill –with pictures!

AWS: Managing AWS Command Line with Jake Tasks

AWS: Managing AWS Command Line with Jake Tasks

The AWS Command Line [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/iam/attach-role-policy.html] is awesome. The commands are descriptive, well organized and oftentimes easier to use than any of the dashboard consoles. If you're looking or a simple NodeJS tool to help you to script and automate commands,

AWS: Install a Node app on AWS

I normally use Heroku [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-nodejs#introduction] or Openshift [https://www.chrisjmendez.com/2012/04/29/expressjs-app-with-mongodb-on-openshift/] to publish apps but AWS works too. Here's a cheatsheet on how to set-up your NodeJS server from scratch on AWS. This cheatsheet will focus on the development environment

Getting Started with NEAR blockchain DApp development

Getting Started with NEAR blockchain DApp development

How to get started with front-end (DApp) and back-end smart contract development on the NEAR blockchain.

Wrangling Javascript DataFrames using Data-Forge

Wrangling Javascript DataFrames using Data-Forge

How to use Data-Forge to help you easily itemize your expenses.

How to capture latitude and longitude from an address using Google Maps API

How to capture latitude and longitude from an address using Google Maps API

How to use Google Maps GeoCoder API to capture latitude and longitude from an array of addresses.

Finance: Calculating Annuities using ES6

Annuities are cool. They're fixed payments over a period of time. If you're living in England, there's another financial product called a consol that is an annuity that pays out in perpetuity. Amazing. Below are simplified examples of how to calculate present value and future value for annuities. I wasn't

AWS: Lambda development on OS X

Through AWS Lambda [https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/], AWS is completely changing the entire web industry, again. If you're not familiar with Lambda, it's a new AWS compute service that manages the AWS resources for us. Said differently, it allows developers to write their applications without having to manage servers.

Simple Sendgrid Example using Node

Here is a very simple example of how to create a simple Sendgrid app using NodeJS. Change directory into your node app. cd /name/of/node/app Install Sendgrid [https://sendgrid.com/] using Node Package Manager. npm i sendgrid Use your Sendgrid username and password to send an email. var

Anatomy of an Angular 2 App

Anatomy of an Angular 2 App

Angular 2 is out and I'm currently working on a single web app hosted on Firebase. This will be a simple landing page website and if you come from Ruby on Rails [http://guides.rubyonrails.org/command_line.html] or Express JS [https://expressjs.com/en/starter/generator.html], you're

MIDI: Curated list of MIDI frameworks for iOS development

MIDI: Curated list of MIDI frameworks for iOS development

I wanted to share a few nuts and bolts of MIDI for iOS development. Specifically, the best frameworks out there, a process for exploring MIDI, etc. MIDI Frameworks * AudioKit [https://audiokit.io/] is by far the best for Swift developers. * Csound [https://csound.com/] is a music computing system and

AWS: EC2 + NodeJS + Forever

I have a few ExpressJS applications that use Forever [https://www.npmjs.com/package/forever] to keep things always moving. The scripts below are what I use invoke the servers. Start Create a my-app/start file. #!/bin/bash # Invoke the Forever module (to START our Node.js server). ./node_modules/

NodeJS: Return Elevation from Google Maps API

Here's how to use Google Maps API to get the elevation of a specific location. /** Use Google maps API to return the elevation of a given [ lat, lng ] **/ var http = require("http"), sys = require("util"); //Google provides the elevation of a given latitude + longitude function getElevation( lat, lng, callback ){ //Google

Creating an Express app with MongoDB on Openshift (Deprecated)

Deprecated Openshift v2.0 has now reached End of Life [https://blog.openshift.com/migrate-to-v3-v2-eol/] and will be replaced by v3.0. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here's how to create a NodeJS app with MongoDB on Openshift using Command-Line. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Step 1 OpenShift the command line to create the Node.JS app. rhc

Streaming Mp3's using SoundManager2 + MediaElement

I've written about 8 or 9 streaming music players in the past six years, and considering how quickly client-side technology changes, I figure I'll have to write a few more before all browsers start fully supporting HTML5. But in the meantime, while researching how to develop a streaming player using

How to install Svelte on macOS using Node Package Manager (NPM)

Create a high-performance, lightweight, web application using Svelte framework.

Scraping web pages with ScrapingBee

Scraping web pages with ScrapingBee

PhantomJS is dead, how to scrape web pages through ScrapingBee.

Installing Vue + Rails 5.x

How to install Vue.js framework on Ruby on Rails.

Node: Configure Jupyter to work with Node on a Mac

Node: Configure Jupyter to work with Node on a Mac

How to configure Jupyter to work with NodeJS on a Mac.