While weather insights are critical to many businesses, local weather data on a more personal and practical level can be important as well. Since I recently moved to an area with some pretty extreme weather, I find myself monitoring and measuring the local conditions much more than I used to. And with wind gusts that […]
Category: Programming
RubyMotion versus Swift for iOS Development
As I worked on the IBM Watson and Apple Core ML partnership, I was inspired to explore more ways to showcase machine learning for developers in different ways. One of my ideas was to look into using RubyMotion with IBM Watson. If you’re not familiar, RubyMotion lets developers quickly write cross-platform native apps for iOS, […]
Video: Machine Learning on iOS, Integrating IBM Watson with Core ML at AltConf
Earlier this year I attended AltConf in San Jose, a community-driven and supported event held alongside Apple’s WWDC. IBM sponsored the event and offered numerous workshops to attendees. In addition to assisting with the workshops and manning the booth, I had a talk accepted on Machine Learning on iOS: Integrating IBM Watson with Core ML. […]
Getting Started with Artificial Intelligence: A Practical Guide to Building Applications in the Enterprise
For the past several months I’ve been co-writing a book that was recently published by O’Reilly. Called Getting Started with Artificial Intelligence: A Practical Guide to Building Enterprise Applications, the book is currently offered by IBM as a free download. Written with Josh Zheng to introduce developers and technical managers to using artificial intelligence when […]
How to Create an API for Your Application, Part 1
Despite being the lingua franca of the internet, APIs remain wildly inconsistent in both their structure and documentation for developers. While the promise of APIs has largely been fulfilled, their actual usage for developers day-to-day often remains frustrating. Since an API in and of itself is just the mechanism for a service to offer access […]
The Black Triangle
Not sure where (or when for that matter) I stumbled on this article, but after cleaning up tons of tabs in Firefox I thought I’d share this: We came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you […]
TextMate Preview Shortcut Trick
I recently learned a new shortcut within the TextMate editor (used daily for all my text editing as well as programming) that has made me much more productive. You can preview any formatted document (so far I’ve tested HTML and Markdown) by simply holding down control-option-command-P Here’s an example from within TextMate while working on […]
Ruby is the Twitter of programming languages
Great quote on Ruby: Ruby is the Twitter of programming languages, capable of expressing its purpose with little dialogue. via 3 areas where MacRuby shines vs. Objective-C – The Ranger Station
The Rise Of JSON
An interesting perspective on why JSON has become so popular compared to XML from MIX Online: The Rise Of JSON: There is the simple fact that JSON is smaller as a payload than XML. And no doubt JSON is less verbose than XML. But there’s much more to it than just size. The crux has to […]
Small Business Backup System Using Amazon S3
My friend Thomas Myer has a great article up on the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection on Building a Small Business Backup System Using Amazon S3. When you run a small business, you’re usually running too fast and hard to think about data backups. Then something terrible happensâ??a hardware failure, an employee or contractor gets […]