Learn Canvas, Natural and Serverless

Starting from a prebuilt frontend, Jason Lengstorf guides you through the creation of a "Corgi Up-boop App" that uses Netlify Functions and Hasura. You can view [the deployed final product on Netlify](https://egghead-serverless-functions.netlify.app/).

You'll set up the Netlify CLI, and configure a local development environment before writing and deploying functions with a few different use cases.

The first example function bypasses CORS restrictions to retrieve corgi data from an example third-party API.

Next, you'll configure environmental variables to securely communicate with the Unsplash API without exposing private keys to the client.

Serverless functions don't persist data by themselves, so we will use  Hasura to create a GraphQL API for tracking the number of "boops" each corgi receives.

This course is an excellent illustration of the speed of Serverless functions, and how fast you can implement functionality in your web applications.

An all-in-one workflow that combines global deployment, continuous integration, and automatic HTTPS.

netlify

Build a Corgi Up-boop Web App with Netlify Serverless Functions and Hasura

In this course we’ll work through Natural’s API for natural language processing in JavaScript. We’ll look at how to process text: learning how to break up language strings, find the word roots, work with inflectors, find sequences of words, and tag parts of speech. We’ll learn how to find important stats about a body of text: how to compare strings, how to classify text with machine learning, how to use the tf-idf tool to find relevant words. We’ll look at some of the extra tools Natural gives us, including the dictionary/thesaurus of WordNet, a phonetics comparer that lets us see if two words sound the same, and a spellcheck feature. We’ll also look at tries and digraphs, two data structures that help us better analyze bodies of text.

Natural is a general natural language facility for nodejs. Tokenizing, stemming, classification, phonetics, tf-idf, WordNet, string similarity, and some inflections are currently supported.

natural

Natural Language Processing in JavaScript with Natural

Create a serverless application and deploy it in under thirty minutes!

We'll be using Netlify, Vite, TypeScript, and React in our project. This stack synergizes extremely well for rapidly developing professional-quality applications. 

If you haven't heard of Vite, it's the French word for quick! It's also a build tool that consists of a dev-server and an extremely fast bundler. It makes for a rapid development loop.

As for the rest. Netlify makes hosting fast and easy with serverless functions and continuous deployment. React enables you to quickly create reusable components. And TypeScript helps you write cleaner code that is easier to refactor. 

So get started and learn how to use this stack in your own applications!

Create a TypeScript powered serverless React application

A <canvas> element provides scripts with a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly.

canvas

Learn some of the different ways you can affect the graphical content that you are drawing to a canvas. We'll cover global alpha, global composite operations and shadows.

Canvas Effects

With the HTML `canvas` you can easily draw text as well as graphics. Let's take a look at basic text manipulation on the canvas.

Drawing Text on Canvas

We will learn about “stemming,” the process of finding the root of words, often in order to group words by a common base root. We will look at the Porter and Lancaster Stemmers, briefly touch on Natural’s support for Russian and Spanish stemmers, and introduce the function to stem and tokenize at the same time.

Find the roots of words using stemming in Natural

Inflectors are the modifiers of a word that indicate grammatical categories. While Natural’s coverage of inflectors is not comprehensive, we will show how Natural can pluralize/singularize nouns and count numbers. 

Pluralizing nouns and counting numbers with inflectors in Natural

N-grams are sequences of words, where the 'n' stands for the number of words in the sequence. In this lesson, we will see how to find bigrams (2-grams), trigrams (3-grams), and any other length n-gram in a body of text. 

Find sequences of words (n-grams) using Natural

We will learn how to compare how similar two strings are to each other, examining three algorithms: Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, and Dice’s Coefficient.  

You should note that none of these algorithms are inherently better than the others. Instead, it's important to choose the one that best fits your text data. 

Compare similarity of strings through string distance in Natural

In this lesson, we will learn how to train a Naive Bayes classifier or a Logistic Regression classifier - basic machine learning algorithms - in order to classify text into categories.

Classify text into categories with machine learning in Natural

In this lesson, we will learn how to train a Naive Bayes classifier and a Logistic Regression classifier - basic machine learning algorithms - on JSON text data, and classify it into categories.

While this dataset is still considered a small dataset -- only a couple hundred points of data -- we'll start to get better results.

The general rule is that Logistic Regression will work better than Naive Bayes, but only if there is enough data. Since this is still a pretty small dataset, Naive Bayes works better here. Generally, Logistic Regression takes longer to train as well. 

This uses data from Ana Cachopo: http://ana.cachopo.org/datasets-for-single-label-text-categorization

Classify JSON text data with machine learning in Natural

Tries are a data structure that provide an efficient way to search for the existence of a word or phrase in a body of text, or to search by prefix. 

Search more efficiently with tries using Natural

In this lesson, we cover several different ways to animate graphics drawn to Canvas.

Animating with Canvas

When drawing on the HTML5 canvas element, your fills aren't limited to flat colors. You can use gradients to get smoothly blended color fills on your drawn elements.

Gradient Fills on the HTML5 Canvas

In this lesson, we’ll see how to use Natural’s probabilistic spell-checker, which uses the trie data structure. 

Include spell-check in text projects using Natural

Tf-idf, or term frequency-inverse document frequency, is a statistic that indicates how important a word is to the entire document. This lesson will explain term frequency and inverse document frequency, and show how we can use tf-idf to identify the most relevant words in a body of text. 

Identify the most important words in a document using tf-idf in Natural

Transformations can change the default canvas coordinate system and create complex drawings with much less code.

Canvas Transformations

In this lesson, listening for and handling mouse and keyboard events in Canvas is covered.

Listening for Mouse and Keyboard Events with HTML Canvas

The HTML Canvas element allows us to access powerful drawing APIs from JavaScript. In this lesson, the first in a series, we will learn about `<canvas>`, and get ready to start drawing.

Introduction to the HTML Canvas element

Now that we have an HTML5 canvas to draw on, let's take a look at drawing simple lines and rectangles with JavaScript

Drawing Paths - Lines and Rectangles

When drawing on your HTML canvas in JavaScript, you aren't restricted to straight lines. Using curves and arcs you are able to create smooth curved lines.