Simple web scraping with Node.js / JavaScript Following up on my popular tutorial on how to create an easy web crawler in Node.js I decided to extend the idea a bit further by scraping a few popular websites. For
How to install Docker on Windows behind a proxy My journey into Docker started with TensorFlow, Google's machine learning library. TensorFlow provided no installation instructions for a Windows machine, but they did have instructions for installing it using Docker. Okay, so I
How to make a web crawler in JavaScript / Node.js The two most popular posts on this blog are how to create a web crawler in Python and how to create a web crawler in Java. Since JavaScript is increasingly becoming a very
Machine Learning with Decision Trees I've been playing around with scikit-learn, Python's machine learning toolkit over the last couple weeks, in conjunction with Georgia Tech's Machine Learning course hosted on Udacity. The course is broken up into three
Installing InfluxDB and Grafana on an EC2 instance I recently set up InfluxDB 0.9.0 (to collect time series data) and Grafana 2.0 (to monitor and benchmark that data) on a t2.micro Amazon EC2 instance running Ubuntu 14.
Updating a Node.js web application without downtime I have a Node.js/Express web application running on localhost:3010 that's on, say, version 1.2.2. Suppose I want to update the web application to version 1.3.0 without
How to perform a gentle migration to Git from SVN There are many reasons to use Git. There are lots of different ways of migrating from SVN to Git. After experimenting with a few I found the wonderful git svn command to be
Getting Eclipse, Maven, and Git to play nice together I've read a lot of how-to guides and tutorials online that quickly tell you how to do something, making it look easy. Sometimes when I ask friends how to do something, they just
How I built ArePeopleTalkingAboutIt.com This is the story of how I built arepeopletalkingaboutit.com. The idea came to me when I was advocating for Git on my team at work (we're still stuck on SVN). I decided
The case for Git in 2015 This might be an exceptionally strange article for you to read. Perhaps you fully understand the enormous benefits that Git provides and perhaps your team (or yourself, for individual projects) has already made
Redundant host names on Nginx and Apache Shortly after switching my site from Wordpress over to Ghost I was taking a look at Google Analytics and noticed this alert: Property http://www.netinstructions.com is receiving data from redundant hostnames.
Charts are awesome Have you ever watched Coda Hale's Metrics, Metrics Everywhere talk? A few choice graphs can show incredible insight into your entire application, touching on many areas. And best of all, they're often easy
Git and SVN together Ever wonder if you can use git and svn to manage the same codebase? In this demonstration I check out a project from SVN, initialize a git repository within that SVN repository, and
Please read the comments section I've seen friends share articles with which they agree on Facebook including the caveat, "just don't read the comments section." I've learned there's even a don't read the comments movement (or
A developer's thoughts on estimating software development I recently attended a class on estimation. While I believe in the value of estimating I am extremely wary of making too big of science out of something that is inherently imprecise. The
How to make a simple web crawler in Java A year or two after I created the dead simple web crawler in Python, I was curious how many lines of code and classes would be required to write it in Java. It
My live migration from Wordpress to Ghost A few months ago I heard about the Ghost blogging platform as it picked up some momentum and was being talked about in all the tech circles. My initial thoughts were "Why
automation Automating Picture Capture Using Webcams on Linux/Ubuntu Ever want to turn a laptop into a webcam surveillance monitoring tool, or use a USB webcam to take pictures every 5 minutes to record a timelapse video? Or maybe you just want
gopro I Wish I Was Excited About The GoPro Camera Craze Let's take a moment to talk about technology in the consumer space. A few years ago, an exciting little device started popping up. At first it lurked around on the some small tech
calendar Google's re-branded header makes me go (slightly) crazy Since I'm such a devout Google user, I often have GMail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) open in three different tabs on Google web browser - Google Chrome. I'm often
google messenger What's wrong with Google's poorly integrated instant messaging services Let's take a quick count of all the ways we can send instant messages via Google products: The chat bar in Gmail The chat bar in Google+ Google Talk for mobile phones Google
bootable USB Puppy Linux saved the day after the death of my SSD This past weekend my hard drive failed. Saturday night I attempted to turn on my computer and received the all-too-familiar message "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" which
Beginner Next steps for aspiring programmers (after you know the basics) Are you teaching yourself how to program and write code? Or do you have extra time to kill and want to brush up on your skills? Did you already make the "Hello
API How to connect to an API and parse XML (and why you would want to) Many beginner programmers see the acronym API all over the place. Why are API's everywhere? What do you do with them? How do they work? At the same time, many beginner programmers see
Beginner How I taught myself to program (and which languages in what order) Interested in learning to program and write code? Wondering what programming language you should teach yourself? Curious how other people got started? In this article I'll explain how I started from ground zero,