Lately I’ve been learning more about cloud architecture and related tooling. Stuff like Lambda, Serverless, AWS CLI and – now that it’s a part of Docker Machine – container orchestration with Docker Swarm clusters.

As an AWS user I’m particularly geeked about the Docker Private Beta, which makes it possible to experiment with Swarm using Amazon Web Services. But rather than waiting for a private beta we’re going to experiment with Docker Swarm using one of my favorite prototyping tools apart from the RPi: Digital Ocean.

So you found out how Smashing Magazine got 10x faster and want to create your own JAMstack website with Hugo. If so, you’re in luck because I’m going to show you how to do it using Amazon Web Services so you don’t end up paying through the nose for hosting or locked into a provider which might disappear.

You know the drill. When you’re building for the Web or mobile performance is everything. Out of the box Sketch does not lend itself to producing flyweight images. But that doesn’t mean you need a second image editor, or even another tool, just to create performant images. Use these techniques to reduce file sizes and optimize images with Sketch.

WordPress continues to become more and more sophisticated as time draws on, with a constantly improving admin dashboard and easy-to-use plugin architecture. And themes like  Twenty Eleven give both bloggers and web developers something to appreciate. But while WordPress is a great CMS for personal blogs, it’s not well suited for more complex applications such as Drupal, on the other hand, and by design, excels at all of the above and more.

his article will look at some of the similarities and differences between WordPress and Drupal 7, explain how to accomplish some of the less intuitive administration procedures in Drupal, share some newbie gotchas and timesavers, and provide a list of modules useful to get a new Drupal site off the ground. It is assumed readers are new to Drupal but have a familiarity with using the WordPress blogging platform.

For several weeks I’ve been thinking about how to go about creating a chat application. After a knowledge drop from Kent Safranski I was inspired to stand-up the chat app using Redis. For the experiment I decided to use Go given the concurrency affordances baked into the language. So I took A Tour of Go and hit the blogs to see what I could find in the open source community.

Reading Redis, Go, & How to Build a Chat Application made me aware of Redigo, a Go client for Redis, and helped demystify use of Redis’ PubSub with Go. The article was a solid introduction and did a great job breaking things down, but ultimately left me wanting a prototype to try things out on the Web. After some more sleuthing on DuckDuckGo I discovered an open source demo app meeting my requirements and providing a great sandbox for experimentation.

In this article I’ll cover how to create a chat application which uses Redis and Go by leveraging open source software and Docker, and use Ngrok to expose the app to the Web over HTTPS.

While working on a React Native app for Lumpen Radio I got to the point where I was ready to enter beta - and I needed an App Icon for my app. I hit up a few peeps with apps already in the App Store to understand how they created their app icons. Much to my chagrin I found out each of them had created their app icons manually using an image editing tool of some sort. Not wanting to work through the process of manual image creation using a GUI editor I stumbled upon an Inkscape template and accompanying script that’ll do it for you.

I earlier this month I spent way too much time trying to SFTP to Ubuntu Server with Sublime Text. The purpose of the SFTP effort was to set myself up for developing modern web applications on a new Windows 8 machine I bought to play SimCity 2013. And after getting everything working I realized the SFTP method had some gremlins and the file syncing reminded me of Dreamweaver—it simply wasn’t fast enough.

Lately, unless you were running a Linux machine or had the pleasure of owning a Mac with OS X, developing modern web applications has been a bit of a kludge. Enter Vagrant.

Vagrant is a tool for building complete development environments. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases development/production parity, and makes the “works on my machine” excuse a relic of the past.

In this article I’ll explain how to set up a development environment in Windows using a virtualized Linux box, suitable for rapid prototyping. Then I’ll take it a step further and explain how to integrate a Backbone-based application framework with Vagrant and Sublime Text, greatly increasing the speed for developing modern web applications on Windows.

I installed DOSBox on my Raspberry Pi today so I could play one of my favorite childhood games: Ultima Underworld - The Stygian Abyss. You can learn more about this game on Abandonia. If you like what you see, follow this guide to set it up on your RPi and be instantly transported back in time with this 1992 retro classic.

I’m learning how to run IRC on my Raspberry Pi so I can have a distraction in my lab. The setup I’ve got is pretty spartan, but that’s what I was going for on a $35 Linux box running off an 8GB SD card. You can do this too! It’s simple and fun. Why not give it a shot?

A few years back Sauce Labs co-founder Jason Huggins ( @hugs) was giving a talk at js.chi(), showing us how to use an Arduino to change the color of an LED based on an input. During the talk Jason suggested those interested in microcontrollers check out Pumping Station: One up on Clybourn. So I got some friends together and we went to PS1, and learned the basics of programming an Arduino. The event was a fun experience and, later that night, netted me a working Larson Scanner. Since then I’ve procured a Raspberry PI, and started tinkering with Google Coder. And now it’s time for Tessel.

rupa/z is an amazing shell script that allows users to traverse a filesystem in no time flat. Use it if you spend any time at all changing directories in a *nix environment. It will improve productivity and spare fat fingers quite a bit of backpedaling.