JavaScript

BuildOct 13, 2016

DIY Android App Compares Bus Routes to Uber in Real time

As a city dweller, this definitely falls in the category of #firstworldproblems. Do I wait for the bus, hail a taxi, or call an Uber? I thought it would be neat to solve this problem using PubNub’s Project EON on the mobile platform (in this case, Android, because I had already used EON on iOS in a past...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
ChatOct 12, 2016

Cloud Computing: the Dream vs. Reality

Good News! We’ve launched an all new Chat Resource Center. We recommend checking out our new Chat Resource Center, which includes overviews, tutorials, and design patterns for building and deploying mobile and web chat. Take me to the Chat Resource Center → The dream of cloud computing is wonderful:...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildSep 27, 2016

Build a Smart Home UI to Control Your Garage Door

Welcome back! In the previous article, we explored smart home automation via a garage door opener service using LiftMaster, PubNub, and Node.js. The context is the growing popularity of two main areas, the Smart Car and Smart Home. Integration of Smart Home door and access control seems like a natural...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildSep 26, 2016

Create a New Language in Less Than 200 Lines of Code

Have you ever wanted to design your own programming language? It seems like such fun, but if you’ve ever tried you probably got stuck right around the time you read “LLR Decent Parsers and Abstract Syntax Trees.” Traditionally designing your own language was hard because it requires a very specialized...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildSep 21, 2016

This Serverless Whack-A-Mole Game is Your Next Game Night

This blog is based on my talk from NodePDX 2016. You can watch the full video of my session, or read my other writings on my personal blog. Today I’m going to build a casual Massively Multiplayer Online game. Something that can have 50 or more people playing at the same time. And I’m going to do...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildSep 20, 2016

Real-time Garage Door Control with a LiftMaster and PubNub

Household appliances are not the kind of thing consumers really get excited about; they’re no iPhone. But thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), that seems to be changing. It is now easy, inexpensive, and a lot more fun to create connected devices in every area of life, from cars and homes to...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildSep 15, 2016

Meow: A Programming Language Created in Just 180 Lines

In the three previous posts in this series, we learned how to use Ohm to parse numbers, build an expression tree, and process blocks of code with conditionals. In this final post on the Ohm series, we will finish up our complete programming language, Meow, with looping and real function calls. Thanks...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildSep 14, 2016

Add Code Blocks and Conditionals to Ohm

Welcome back! In our first Ohm post, we introduced Ohm and built our very own parser to handle numbers in various formats. In our second post, we turned our parser into a real arithmetic language with binary operations and symbols. Today we will give our language code blocks and conditionals.  ...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildSep 8, 2016

Build Your Own Symbol Calculator with Ohm

Last time I introduced Ohm, an open source meta language parser with an easy to use syntax, we built a parser for different number formats. Basically, I showed you how to easily build your own programming language with just a few lines of code. This week we will extend the parser to calculate arithmetic...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll