Google Cloud Platform 2020
Much of my experience as a developer has involved moving code and installing software on actual machines located either locally or on racks in server farms. GCP offers a completely different way of doing things. All of the hardware is provided by Google. Machines are abstracted into services that are accessed via a web interface or command line prompt. I have studied GCP in depth and launched many projects. Included is a sampling that will increase in size as items are added.
Android
Android Studio is tricky to setup on GCP on Ubuntu 20.04 . Although the install is super fast the emulators will not work. The official tutorial in the google community pages does not cover the latest flavor of ubuntu. It was a bit tricky and I am preparing an article/tutorial about hooking up the requirements.
Visual Studio Code
Out of curiousity I set out and installed VSCODE on a remote ubutunu box. The latency issues with VNC and the lack of cut and paste functionality limit
the effectiveness of using this form of remote editor. I had hoped that it would let me code faster than vim and wanted to see if it would work on a linux os.
I found that a much better solution was to add the ssh remote plugin to Visual Studio. Doing this and running gcloud compute config-ssh in a command shell
makes it possible to edit files directly on remote GCP servers.
Here we are coding on a remote box
Docker
A previous post scrabble details scrabble applications built out with various applications.
With Docker it was easy to move my old legacy code off the server and into images on docker hub and stop paying monthly fees. The code has also been
moved to git. One of the nice things about installing docker on remote machines is the ability to run multiple instances on different boxes. This works
great for testing things out and for not tying up resources on a laptop or other work machine.
Below is a screen capture of my three screens showing two remote servers in VSCODE as well as the blog code a gcp sdk console and a small app running on a
container.
Appsheet
I am working with a local psychologist who is a world authority on helping individuals recovering from substances and other PTSD related conditions. We are converting a paper workflow to a prototype progress tracking app. Using the latest metrics the first application was first modelled and built on Gsuite.
There were painpoints with installation on phones asking users to install html launchers. A superior intermediary solutions is Appsheet. Appsheet lets
coders and non coders alike build applications with up to 10 free test accounts.
We have a fully functional app running on ios and android launched from this platform. Appsheet
More GCP
Where to start ?
Here is the stub for the next section of this blog post. All of these and more are hooked up on remote servers.
Python — selenium data miner — miner facebook — twitly — plotly and dash — implemented financial data pulls from yfinance and others — ML AI , spaci
Coldfusion lucee PHP Laravel