Category Archives: Web Development

Parallax Scroll with CSS

Front End Development, Google, portfolio

My first portfolio project will be FreeCodeCamp’s “Tribute page”, the first project in their beginner Responsive Web Design track.

It’s a fairly simple web page, and it would be pretty easy to create a minimal solution that fulfills all the requirements. But if I’m going to add it to my portfolio, I want something at least a little better than the minimum, so I’ve been thinking about ways to improve the look of the page.

Parallax scrolling is where two or more elements on a web page move at different speeds when the page is scrolled (vertically or horizontally). It’s a little gimmicky, I suppose, but I think it will work for this project.

The Google Web Developers December 2016 Updates (blog) had an article titled Performant Parallaxing that explained how to implement parallax scrolling using CSS that works cross-browser.

It looks like it should be pretty simple to add to my first portfolio project. And since I currently work for Google and plan to use Google Maps Platform examples in my later portfolio works, using their parallax scrolling solution for a non-Google portfolio project seems appropriate. However, the article was written in 2016, so it may require changes to work with current browsers.

Web Development and UX Portfolio project ideas

Front End Development, portfolio, Web Development
  • Google Places Autocomplete – select a city, then search within that city’s bounding rectangle (requires updating the AutocompleteOptions dynamically)
  • Shopping list (PHP backend? Google Cloud? Heroku? Netlify? Appsheets?)
  • Exercise tracker (PHP / Heroku / GCloud / Netlify backend? Appsheets?)
  • Toastmasters contest ballots (Appsheets)
  • Mixed-mode transportation search – combine Google Maps Platform and CapMetro APIs to find the closest bus route when the start or finish is outside CapMetro’s service area.
  • Build a proxy server for Google Maps web service APIs, like Raymond Camden’s article on using Pipedream to build a proxy server for APIs. This CSS-Tricks article talks about other ways to build proxies with serverless functions. Google Cloud AppEngine or Endpoints.
  • Interactive Club Finder for Toastmasters (using Google Dynamic Maps)
  • Pomodoro and other timer as Chrome Extension
  • Google web service API tester (builder/tester?) as Chrome Extension, PowerShell GUI, and/or Electron app
  • Vocabulary flash card-type web app (Firebase/Firestore backend)
  • Re-do my Coursera PHP website using AppEngine Standard PHP backend
  • LinkedIn Learning course “Vanilla JavaScript: Ajax and Fetch”, with the Geocoding redone using Google Maps JavaScript API (using API key secured with HTTP referrer restrictions)
  • Web scraping – How many of the top 25 TED talks end with the speaker saying “Thank you”? (see https://www.facebook.com/groups/ToastmastersInternationalMembers/posts/10158908546323542/ for motivation)
  • Web scraping – Build a tool in Google Cloud Shell using Python to crawl a web site and look for references to Maps JavaScript API (may need to use a headless browser to access the DOM, rather than the source HTML)

GOOGLE DIALOGFLOW

Google, language, Web Development

Well, boy is my face red. I identified the wrong Google product to use to create chatbots. (also, I’m writing this while getting in a few minutes of exercise on my FitDesk stationary bike).

In my previous post, I identified the Hangouts Chat API as the Google product to build chatbots. Oops. I think that’s the product to use to add a chatbot into Hangouts Chat.

No, the correct product to build chatbots is Google Dialogflow. Dialogflow is where one would build the interactions that could be used in another environment, such as Hangouts.

Build a chatbot for language learning?

Google, language, Web Development

I’ve been interested in learning languages for most of my life. One thing I struggle with is making the jump from class, book, or app to conversation.

Today I had a thought – what if we used chatbots as a stepping stone between the book/app knowledge and real-world conversations?

I work for Google, so my first thought was to see if Google has a Chatbot API. Turns out, there’s a Hangouts Chatbot API that can be used for free. Score!

But it’s not the only free chatbot API out there – here’s a list of 10 chatbot APIs (including Google’s)

Now the question is – which ones make it easy (or even possible) to build chatbots in another language?