Alex Lakatos

Alex Lakatos

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  • About Me
  • Dev Tricks
  • Joining the Interledger Foundation
    Jul 22, 2021

    Joining the Interledger Foundation

    I’m the new Tech Lead joining the Interledger Foundation. And I’m super excited about that! Moving forward, I’m going to head the Steering Committee for the Interledger Protocol and try to help standardize the specs for Web Monetization, Payment Pointers and Web Payments.

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  • Don’t be THAT guy
    May 28, 2021

    Don’t be THAT guy

    I hate the fact that I live in a world where this needs to be said. And we’re all part of the problem! Because we don’t say it often enough - “Don’t be THAT fucking guy!”.

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  • How to Disable Notification Requests in Modern Browsers
    May 21, 2021

    How to Disable Notification Requests in Modern Browsers

    I absolutely hate it when web pages ask me for permission to send notifications. After one too many accidents, I documented how to disable push notification requests in modern browsers.

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  • The Accidental Public Speaker or How I Got Over My Fear of Public Speaking
    May 14, 2021

    The Accidental Public Speaker or How I Got Over My Fear of Public Speaking

    I’ve given over a hundred talks in the past few years. Why? Because I think it’s perfectly OK for me to be terrified, but it’s not OK for me to stay that way. My biggest fear? Same as you, same as everybody else. I was afraid to speak in front of people. A hundred talks later, I’m still terrified every time I go on stage. How did I ever get on stage, though? Well, here’s a little trip down memory lane, the series of unfortunate events that got me up on stage.

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  • Meet zx: A Better Way to Write Scripts with Node.js
    May 11, 2021

    Meet zx: A Better Way to Write Scripts with Node.js

    Bash is great and all, but it’s not something I’ll pick up in a day. I was looking for something a little bit more convenient to write scripts in. While looking, I’ve stumbled upon this little utility from Google called zx. And it’s a better way to write scripts using JavaScript.

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  • How to Get Your First Job in Developer Relations
    May 4, 2021

    How to Get Your First Job in Developer Relations

    Hello, my name is Alex, and I’m an… Advocate. A Developer Advocate. What does that mean? I am the bridge between a product and the developer community using that product. How did I get here? I’m going to tell you all about that and how you can do the same.

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  • Adding Multi-Factor Authentication to Your App, the Easy Way
    Jan 19, 2021

    Adding Multi-Factor Authentication to Your App, the Easy Way

    The methods of authenticating users are also called factors, or pieces of evidence required for authentication, which is where the term multi-factor authentication originates. Multi-factor implies more than one factor is used, so technically 2FA is the minimum number of factors to be used for MFA. Depending on your application’s security level, you can choose to increase the number of factors used to authenticate your users. Before we get ahead of ourselves and ask for ten pieces of data, let’s look at the available options.

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  • 2020, Thank You!
    Jan 9, 2021

    2020, Thank You!

    2020 was kind of shit. Go on, it’s OK to admit it. But when I look in the mirror, 2020 was a lot healthier for me than usual. I’ve seen quite a few 2020 reviews this past week. It’s the fashionable thing to do. Hence this is my first yearly review. I’m going to try to use this as a sort of guide for next year. Now, whilst most reviews I’ve read highlighted the things people couldn’t do in 2020, or the exact ways in which it sucked, I made a conscious decision to try to find things that actually went well for me in 2020, and not even mention any of the negative shit 2020 is famous for.

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  • How a Good Onboarding is Improving the Developer Experience
    Dec 9, 2020

    How a Good Onboarding is Improving the Developer Experience

    We’ve spent time improving the Fidel onboarding experience, and I’ve put that process, reasons and outcomes into words. And GIFs.

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  • Creating a DevRel Culture
    Dec 6, 2020

    Creating a DevRel Culture

    My challenge was scaling a DevRel program without increasing the headcount. I’ve achieved that by creating a DevRel Culture instead.

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  • Building a 1st Year Developer Relations Program
    Nov 24, 2020

    Building a 1st Year Developer Relations Program

    Congratulations, you’ve just got a job as the first Developer Relations person in a company. It’s your job to build a Developer Program. Where do you start? When you try googling that, you’ll discover Google isn’t always your friend.

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  • 10 Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years
    Nov 17, 2020

    10 Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

    Exactly 10 years ago today, I was starting my first job in the software industry. There are a bunch of things I wish I would have known before I started. Or at least I wish I would have learned them sooner than I did. I made a list with the top ten!

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  • How to Receive Webhook Events With Netlify Functions and JavaScript
    Jul 27, 2020

    How to Receive Webhook Events With Netlify Functions and JavaScript

    If you’re building event-driven applications, you’ve probably considered building them in a Serverless platform. I’m using Netlify Functions with JavaScript to receive webhook events from an API.

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  • How To Add Image Processing to Your Hugo Website and Improve Performance
    Jul 17, 2020

    How To Add Image Processing to Your Hugo Website and Improve Performance

    Switching my Hugo site from static images to shortcodes and image processing shaved 3 and a half seconds from my Largest Contentful Paint, got my Lighthouse Performance, Accessibility and SEO scores to 100, and gave me the chance to effortlessly have responsive images.

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  • Comparing CLI Building Libraries
    Jun 12, 2020

    Comparing CLI Building Libraries

    Looking at CLI Building Libraries, and the criteria we used to analyze them. I’m also going to show you some pros and cons of the ones we picked to build our proofs of concept with.

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  • Building Your Next CLI
    Jun 5, 2020

    Building Your Next CLI

    I thought I’d share the process Nexmo’s using to work on their next CLI application, in case you are interested or have a project like this yourself someday.

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  • How to Make and Receive Phone Calls with Nuxt.js
    Mar 2, 2020

    How to Make and Receive Phone Calls with Nuxt.js

    I’ve explored the Nuxt.js framework in a previous blog post, and I liked it so much that I was looking for reasons to use it more. So I thought it would be good to take what I learned in there and apply it to a more complex API. I wrote the Middleware methods using Node.js requests, so this blog post expands on them, using them not only for plain text but for JSON requests as well.

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  • How to Send and Receive SMS Messages with Nuxt.js and the Nexmo SMS API
    Feb 19, 2020

    How to Send and Receive SMS Messages with Nuxt.js and the Nexmo SMS API

    I wanted to explore the Vue.js ecosystem some more, and I’ve stumbled upon Nuxt.js. I thought that Nuxt Middleware would make an excellent substitute to handle API calls on the server, instead of having to set up a second back-end application. In this blog post, I’m going to use Nuxt.js server middleware to send and receive SMS messages.

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  • How to Send and Receive SMS Messages With Node.js and Azure Functions
    Jan 29, 2020

    How to Send and Receive SMS Messages With Node.js and Azure Functions

    This article originally appeared on the Nexmo blog. If you want to try it out, I’ve set up a few Nexmo phone numbers for different countries, and you can send an SMS message to +447451272987 or +13095902987 to get your messages back as emojis. If you want me to set up a number for your country, tell me on Twitter, I’ll provision it and update the post here for others to use.

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  • A Year of Developer Avocados Weekly
    Oct 8, 2019

    A Year of Developer Avocados Weekly

    It’s been a year since we published the first issue of The Developer Avocados🥑 Weekly newsletter. We’ve published issue number 49 yesterday, and we wanted to reflect on the amazing journey this has been.

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  • How to Send and Receive SMS Messages With Node.js and Express
    Sep 16, 2019

    How to Send and Receive SMS Messages With Node.js and Express

    Nexmo has a couple of APIs that allow you to send and receive a high volume of SMS anywhere in the world. Once you get your virtual phone number, you can use the APIs to manage outbound messages (“sending”) and inbound messages (“receiving”). In this article, you will learn how to send and receive SMS messages with Node.js and Express.

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  • A Day in the Glamorous Life of a Developer Advocate
    Sep 11, 2019

    A Day in the Glamorous Life of a Developer Advocate

    This whole article spanned out of a Twitter thread happening over the weekend, and I felt I wasn’t doing it justice with a series of 280 character posts. I’ve also embedded the thread at the bottom of this post, so it’s easier to see the whole context in one place. A few misconceptions are floating around the internet about what a Developer Advocate does regularly, and they revolve around the glamorous life we’re having, jetting around the world daily. I thought I’d share what being a Developer Advocate is for me, and what I do and don’t do on a regular basis.

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  • 5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - Storage Inspector
    Sep 3, 2019

    5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - Storage Inspector

    This is the sixth post in a series of productivity tips and tricks to help you debug web applications with Firefox Devtools. It shows you 5 tips & tricks for working with the Storage Inspector in the Firefox Developer Tools.

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  • 5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - Responsive Design Mode
    Jul 30, 2019

    5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - Responsive Design Mode

    This is the fifth post in a series of productivity tips and tricks to help you debug web applications with Firefox Devtools. It shows you 5 tips & tricks for working with the Responsive Design Mode in the Firefox Developer Tools.

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  • 5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - Network Monitor
    May 7, 2019

    5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - Network Monitor

    This is the fourth post in a series of productivity tips and tricks to help you debug web applications with Firefox Devtools. It shows you 5 tips & tricks for working with the Network Monitor in the Firefox Developer Tools.

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  • 5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - JavaScript Debugger
    Apr 27, 2019

    5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - JavaScript Debugger

    This is the third post in a series of productivity tips and tricks to help you debug web applications with Firefox Devtools. It shows you 5 tips & tricks for working with the JavaScript Debugger in the Firefox Developer Tools.

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  • 5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - Web Console
    Apr 19, 2019

    5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - Web Console

    This is the second post in a series of productivity tips and tricks to help you debug web applications with Firefox Devtools. It shows you 5 tips & tricks for working with the Web Console and the Console API in the Firefox Developer Tools.

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  • 5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - Page Inspector
    Apr 13, 2019

    5 Tips and Tricks for Firefox DevTools - Page Inspector

    This is the first post in a series of productivity tips and tricks to help you debug web applications with Firefox Devtools. It shows you 5 tips & tricks for working with the Page Inspector in the Firefox Developer Tools.

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  • Build an Interactive Voice Response Menu using Node.js and Express
    Apr 8, 2019

    Build an Interactive Voice Response Menu using Node.js and Express

    This article originally appeared on the Nexmo blog, but I wanted to add some more content to it specially for the dev.to community. If you don’t want to follow along but you just want to try it out, I’ve put my code on Glitch and setup a Nexmo application with a few Nexmo phone numbers for different countries, you can call +442038973497 or +19373652539 and play with the interactive voice response. If you want me to setup a number for your contry, just tell me on Twitter, I’ll provision it and update the post here for others to use.

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  • Send SMS When Your Typeform Is Submitted Using Node.js, Hapi and the Messages API
    Oct 30, 2018

    Send SMS When Your Typeform Is Submitted Using Node.js, Hapi and the Messages API

    In this tutorial we are going to learn how to send a SMS when your Typeform is submitted using the Nexmo Messages API and the Node.js framework Hapi.

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  • SMS Notifications in the Browser with Angular
    Aug 7, 2018

    SMS Notifications in the Browser with Angular

    The Nexmo SMS API allows you to send and receive messages around the world using a virtual number that you can buy from Nexmo. In this tutorial, we’ll see how you can use Node.js and Express to receive an SMS, send it via Ably to a web browser, and then use Angular to display it as a notification in a Single Page Application.

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  • How to Connect a Phone Call to Nexmo In-App Voice
    May 13, 2018

    How to Connect a Phone Call to Nexmo In-App Voice

    The Nexmo Voice API allows you to build high-quality programmable voice applications in The Cloud. With the Voice API, you can manage outbound and inbound calls in JSON, record and store calls, create a conference call, send text-to-speech messages in 23 languages with varieties of voices and accents, and so on.

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  • Build a Chat Application with Angular Material and the Nexmo In-App JavaScript SDK
    Mar 28, 2018

    Build a Chat Application with Angular Material and the Nexmo In-App JavaScript SDK

    Nexmo Stitch is a conversation-centric product that enables communications across multiple channels including in-app messaging and in-app voice. In this tutorial we’ll enable chat in an Angular web application using the JavaScript SDK and the Stitch API so that users can communicate in our application.

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  • I've joined Nexmo
    Jun 5, 2017

    I've joined Nexmo

    Hi, I’m Alex Lakatos, but most people around the world call me “Laka”. I’m the newly minted JavaScript Developer Advocate joining the Developer Relations team at Nexmo. And I’m super excited about that! Before joining I’ve done all things JavaScript for half a dozen companies around Europe, but eventually figured out I liked going to conferences more than I liked going to the office.

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