Raymond Camden

I was struggling to get some real, productive work done (I just got back from a trip in Europe) and I thought I'd tackle something that's been in my queue for a little while now. This is, yet again, one of my "bad ideas" that you should probably not ever use in production, but it was fun, it made me happy, and you get to see the kind of silliness...

Hey folks! One of the things I promised to do better with the Code Break show was scheduling. With that being said, I'm here to announce the next event and I've got about 4 already on the calendar after that. Hopefully this year I can get a bit more consistent with schedule. That being said, we'll see. Life is crazy at times. ;)Ok, with that out...

As part of my efforts to improve my Python knowledge, I've been looking at the Flask framework for a way to build Python-backed web apps. I've only been looking at it for a short time, but I'm really impressed with how simple it is. In some ways, it reminds me a lot of when I first saw Express. Before that, I wasn't sure I was going to like...

Welcome to the first Links For You of 2025. I'm currently writing this from, I kid you not, the Danube in Austria. My wife and I are a bit over halfway through a European vacation (one we planned before Adobe decided to give me an early Christmas gift of a layoff). So far, it's been absolutely glorious, and I plan on writing about the experience...

As the "Great Social Network Wars" carry on (my term, not anyone else), I'm finding myself more and more enjoying Bluesky. I do more posting on Mastodon, but Bluesky reminds me a lot more of early Twitter. Threads is... ok, but has felt too corporate. I can't even remember the last time I checked it. Earlier this week, I was poking around the...

For a while now I've had a tradition here where I end my "blog year" with a wrap up post looking back at how the year went and figuring out what I want for the upcoming year. This is, honestly, a post just for myself, but as usual, I'm always open to what people think, so feel free to leave me a comment below.Career and ConferencesThis year...

Welcome to the last Links For You for 2024. Believe it or not, I started this series way back in April of 2022, and I don't know about you, but it's been one of my favorite features of my blog. I love sharing cool links (and music videos!) with readers, and I hope yall have enjoyed it as well. This is my second to last post for the year so...

For my last technical post of the year (although I can't promise I'll stop blogging!), I wanted to share an interesting workflow I built using Google Gemini and Pipedream. The idea was somewhat simple - how difficult would it be to build a "general purpose" workflow to look for objects in images and trigger an alert if certain things were found....

Earlier this month I took my first look at using Transformers.js, a JavaScript SDK around multiple different models hosted by Hugging Face. My initial experiments worked pretty OK I think. The sentiment analysis felt pretty good, and the object detection (with a cat demo of course), worked pretty good as well. I was curious how well summarization...

In my time at Adobe, one of the products I evangelized was the PDF Embed API, a JavaScript library for adding PDFs to a web page. I still recommend this library of course, but I was thinking this morning about how you could get similar results without JavaScript. Remember, you are allowed to build a web page and not ship any JavaScript. It's ok,...

Last year I did a fun little experiment where I asked a few different generative models to generateimages based on the classic Twelve Days of Christmas song. For those unfamiliar, the song is about a series of gifts given over twelve days:partridge in a pear treetwo turtle dovesthree French hensfour calling birdsfive golden ringssix geese...

Good morning folks, as I shared yesterday, this week has been a bit rough as I found out my job was eliminated at Adobe, but the outpouring of support, and links to jobs, has been overwhelming. You people are pretty darn good, you know what? I'm confident I'm going to be able to land a good job, but at the same time, it's going to be a heck of a...

This week I discovered, unfortunately, that my position at Adobe has been eliminated. I'm incredibly proud of what I've achieved during my time at Adobe, but now need to find my next opportunity. If you've ever gained anything from one of my posts, or presentations, I'd absolutely love a recommendation or referral for a position in developer...

Hello friends. The next, and final (for the year!) Code Break will be Tuesday, December 17th, one week from today. I've got some surprises in store and would love to use this last session to answer questions from my audience. If you've got a question you would like me (and others - oh wait, that's part of the surprise!) to answer, leave me a...

Generative AI and documents is a fairly common topic these days, typically in the form of creating summaries or asking questions about the documents. I was curious how generative AI could help in terms of classification. Way back in January of this year, I blogged about using Google's Gemini API to classify images based on whether they were a...

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending, and speaking at, connect.tech. One of the cooler presentations I saw was from Danielle Maxwell where she discussed usingAI in the browser and introduced me to Transformers.js. I'd heard of this before, but wasn't quite aware of how easy it was to use. While this isn't necessarily going to replace a...

Hey folks, just a quick note. My next Code Break show will be this Thursday, December 5th, at 12PM CST. I apologize for the randomness of these sessions. My goal in 2025 is to get them a bit more consistent. We'll see how well that works out. ;)To RSVP for the next show, head over to https://cfe.dev/talkshows/codebreak-12052024/. I'll be doing...

Hello folks - I'm a week or so behind on my schedule for these posts, but the last few weeks have been incredibly hectic. I had 5 or so (I've lost track honestly) online presentations and one in-person event at connect.tech, and of course, this week was Thanksgiving. I'm also behind on scheduling for my show, which I hope to fix up later today....

A few months back, I took a look at using JSON-LD to turn a recipe web page into pure data: Scraping Recipes Using Node.js, Pipedream, and JSON-LD. This relied on a recipe actually using JSON-LD in the header to describe itself, which is pretty common for SEO purposes. Still, I was curious as to how well generative AI could solve this problem. In...

A week or so ago, I was doing some tests on Google Colab and noticed something interesting. The notebook I was using was one that took one to two minutes to process. Before I'd start the process, the favicon looked like so:After kicking off the workflow, the favicon changed like so:To be honest, I had not noticed it earlier, but I only fairly...

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at the Mid-Michigan ColdFusion Users Group on the topic of Intl, the web platforms internationalization spec. I gave this presentation again this week at connect.tech as well. I greatly enjoyed working on this deck as I've been using Intl for a while, but had not had the opportunity to look into every...

Yesterday, I gave my presentation on Intl, the browser's built-in support for internationalization. I've been using this for a while now, but while researching the spec for my presentation, I ran into multiple cool aspects of it I wasn't aware of. One feature I thought was particularly interesting was the Segementer object. MDN's description is...

Please take what follows with a Titanic-sized grain of salt and do your best not to do what I did, but despite that, I thought this little hack was interesting and I figured I'd share it anyway. I typically use Reveal.js for my presentations, especially when talking about the web platform, as it makes it easy to do slides and demos, all in my...

The last seven days have been... difficult. I don't think I need to go into why (even for my non-American readers), but I am doing my best, as are a lot of people, to take things day by day. Honestly, as a white hetero man, I'm not so much worried for myself, but I'm deeply concerned about my family and friends who are LGBTQ+ and other...

A few days ago, I blogged about using Chrome's built-in generative AI features (which are still super duper too early to even consider for production) to add on-device translation capabilities to a web app. It got me thinking, what if we could do translation automatically via a web component? If for some reason it failed, that would be fine as...

Hey folks - just a quick warning. This post is kind of a mashup/update of two earlier posts. Back almost two years ago I talked about this process but used Twitter and Mastodon: "Automatically Posting to Mastodon and Twitter on New RSS Items". Earlier this year I first talked about using the Bluesky API, with a very appropriately named post:...

Hey folks - my next will not be this Tuesday as I'll be presenting at API World (assuming American gets me there today) so I've pushed back the livestream till Thursday, November 7th. Usual time - 12PM CST. You can read more about the event here:https://cfe.dev/talkshows/codebreak-11072024/I'm going to be discussing Eleventy and building a basic...

I've done a couple blog posts now on Chrome's efforts to bring generative AI to the browser. It's still somewhat of a rough process (remember, you can sign up for access to test and learn more at the intro post from the Chrome engineers), but it's getting better over time. One thing I mentioned in my last post ("Using Chrome AI to Rewrite Text")...

This post was meant to go out on the weekend, but I got sucked into video games, baking cookies, and, well, watching the Saints suck. I've mentioned this already I think, and I'm pretty sure I talked about it on my stream, but my anxiety which had taken a bit of a back seat for nearly a month has come raging back in. November is going to be kind...

Yesterday I blogged about a change I made to my bots page and in it, I mentioned how the performance wasn't necessarily as good as it could be. I had made the decision to go from server-side and build-time for the page to a purely client-side solution. At the end of the post, I asked folks to let me know if anyone would like to have me work on...

I've got a few pages here that are primarily built for my own use. One of them, my bots page, is a list of all the dumbsuper useful bots I've built for Mastodon (and Bluesky). The idea on this page is to show the latest post from each bot. The bots page makes use of two different shortcodes written in Liquid to do this.The first uses the RSS feed...

Just a quick note to my faithful readers out there - tomorrow, October 22nd, at 12PM CST (Cool Standard Time), I'll be hosting my next episode of :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbJuB7irJMwIn the previous stream, I talked about charting with JavaScript, specifically using Chart.js. In this followup, I'll attempt to use another library so we can...

Yesterday, Elizabeth Siegle, a developer advocate for CLoudflare, showed off a really freaking cool demo making use of Cloudflare's Workers AI support. Her demo made use of WNBA stats to create a beautiful dashboard that's then enhanced with AI. You can find the demo here: https://wnba-analytics-ai-insights.streamlit.app/I found this incredibly...

Forgive the somewhat vague title, but I wanted to point folks to a series of articles I've had published on the Frontend Masters blog the past few weeks. I started writing for them recently, and while I note my "external writing" on my About page, I wanted to specifically call out this series. Over three articles, I discuss reading and writing to...

Happy Sunday and Happy Saints Are Winning As I Write this day. Before I get into the links, some administrative. At the bottom of my posts, I've got share links. A few days ago I removed the share to Twitter link as I've gradually removed myself from that platform. I was on there a few weeks ago desperate for some technical help, but in general,...

A few months ago, I built a little demo that I simply forgot to actually talk about here. A coworker was building something similar and it reminded me to take a look at the code, update it, and actually share it. This is a pretty cool example of integrating multiple different APIs to create a final product, in this case, a short story with...

As I continue to dig into Leaflet, I was recently asked about custom markers based on data, so for example, some locations for a store may use one icon while others use another. I did some digging, and while it turns out Leaflet has deep support for customizing markers, it does take a little bit of work. Here's what I found.First off, this is the...

When I first started talking about Leaftlet, I mentioned how it was "only" a map library, and by that I mean, only able to present a view/wrapper around tiles representing map data. There's a heck of a lot of services that Google Maps, HERE, and so forth, add on top that won't be present, things like routing, geocoding, and more. Considering the...

This week I had the pleasure to present on Google Gemini at the ColdFusion Summit. If you weren't able to make it, I do plan on giving the talk again on the ColdFusion Meetup sometime later this year.After the presentation, I took my 'rough and ugly' code that called Gemini and decided to wrap it up in a nice ColdFusion component. This allows for...

This is just a quick note to let my readers know that Eleventy 3.0 has been released. This is a huge update and folks using it should read the full release notes here: Eleventy v3.0.0: Possums ❤️ ESM.I've been running a beta for a while. You can see the issues I ran into here: Upgraded to Eleventy 3.0 (Beta). I upgraded to the final version...

Hello dear readers. I wish I could say I've got a restful weekend in front of me, but today we're driving to New Orleans to pick up our eldest who has been in Germany for a year, and tomorrow we fly to Las Vegas for the Adobe ColdFusion Summit. Both are things I'm quite happy about, but it's going to be a lot. I'm currently sitting, drinking...