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8 Tips Plus A Bonus To Supercharge Your Development With ChatGPT The amazing leaps and bounds in the past few months with generative AI have changed the landscape for how AI will drive faster efficieny. ChatGPT is going to revolutionize development. Don’t believe me? Well here are 8 ways to interact with ChatGPT to super charge your development right now! Get started right here - https://chat.openai.com Inbox Zero - Efficiently Efficient Inbox Zero - the concept of keeping your inbox empty has been something I have always been intrigued with but failed to do time and again. Not this year. This year I am going to give it a solid try. The Beauty of Low Code We hear a lot about low code but what is it, really? Look the idea you can build software without writing code or less code has been around for a while. If you look at the evolution of computer programming languages from Fortran to Cobol to C, C++ and C#, Java, each step making it easier to build complex applications with a layer of abstraction that allowed developers to focus on the important things. The beauty of low code is that it enables developers to go faster and empowers more people to build things. Platform Engineering - the new paradigm I have been exploring a bit around platform engineering. Its a new paradigm in software development, an evolution of DevOps. 3 Interesting Finds and Some Thoughts Thought of the weekDon’t make things unnecessarily complex. In many conversations I have with customers, colleagues and others, it is this strange desire to make things more complex than they need to be that causes a lot of headaches. You are not Netflix. Bleeding edge for the sake of bleeding isn’t the right strategy. Start with the end in mind and march towards it in the simplest path, you might save yourself a lot of trouble along the way. What On Earth Is Moldable Development Chances are you have never heard of moldable development. And that is OK. But it is an interesting approach to try to solve the biggest time sink in development, namely understanding the current system. Developers spend over 50% of their time trying to figure out the system - can we make this more efficient? Enter Moldable Development. What is a NFT? This is part 2 of my series on the metaverse, NFTs and more. Check out part 1, The Metaverse, Explained, Kind OfPhoto by Clark Tibbs on UnsplashPart 2: NFTs, Intrinsic Value and the New World OrderIt was in early March of 2021 that digital artist, Mike Winkleman, sold an NFT for a 5000 piece collection of his art for a staggering $69 million through the auction house, Christies. It was the first ever purely digital artwork offered through Christies and was a grand entrance into mainstream for NFTs. You can read more about it here but it was a huge amount of money for something that represented a digital file that anyone else could get.So what is this all about? The Metaverse, explained, kind of So you may have heard about NFTs in some form or another. You may also have heard of the metaverse (if you haven’t, you will). You may have been scratching your head about what it all means. Having been in the same boat, I decided to spend some time to try to breakdown - mainly as a forcing function to help me understand it, but I figured others may benefit as well.This is a multipart series, where I start with the Metaverse but explore NFTs and the technology that will potentially power the future. Live Video Broadcast and Mixing in Azure with Teams In media broadcasting, with a continued focus on moving production to the cloud, the idea of virtual production control rooms are taking root. A production control room is the place were incoming feeds are combined together and the outgoing program is created. Virtualizing this brings several key benefits: Some Thoughts on Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2019 Mary Meeker is a venture capitalist whose work focuses primarily on the internet and new technologies. Each year she produces a report about internet trends - both looking back and looking forward. It is always highly anticipated you can check out this year’s here. Below are some of my key takeaways after reading: Using Apache Drill to Access Parquet Files in PowerBI When you are working with data, especially larger data sets, you will come across parquet files. Parquet is a binary columnar storage format which is efficient for several large data use cases both in terms of compression and speed. How AI Is Aiding Repression Highly recommended reading - How Artifical Intelligence is Reshaping RepressionSome points of note:“Around the world, AI systems are showing their potential for abetting repressive regimes and upending the relationship between citizen and state, thereby accelerating a global resurgence of authoritarianism.”AI technology, primarily in the form of facial recognition is being adopted by security forces, driven, in part, with investment from China.Zimbabwe is implementing facial recognition - this is a country that recently carried out large post-election crackdowns. AI and the Art of Lying Interesting article - “Will AI end the Art of Lying?”Some points of note:Swarm Intelligence: the concept that more minds are greater than one is being explored with interesting results from an AI perspective Prepare for Exam 70-774 - Performing Cloud Data Science with Azure Machine Learning I recently passed Exam 70-774 - Performing Cloud Data Science with Azure Machine Learning and thought it may be helpful to provide some guidance on how best to prepare for the exam. Building A Great Data Lake (or How to Avoid a Data Swamp) What is a Data Lake?A Data Lake is a term that gets thrown around a fair amount, often in conjunction with big data. But what does it really mean?At its core, its a central repository for storing unlimited amounts of data from many different sources that you can bring analytics to bear on top of to gain insights. Blockchain Explained Simply Blockchain technology is all the rage these days. You hear about it more and more yet what does it really do and how can you use it? Demystifying The Ways to Use R in the Microsoft Ecosystem In 2015, Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics. Microsoft R was a rebranding of Revolution R. Since the R landscape at Microsoft can be a bit confusing I want to try to lay it out simply. First, Microsoft R Server has been rebranded to Microsoft Machine Learning Server. At the time of writing, ML Server 9.2 was available.So, what are the different ways to use R from Microsoft? Getting Started with Deep Learning I have recently started to work on a set of introductory videos focusing on deep learning and neural networks. The goal of these videos is to explain some of the basic concepts behind various types of neural networks and then give you a hands-on example to show you how you can build your own neural network. I showcase a variety of frameworks such as Keras, CNTK and Tensorflow. I also use a variety of tools from Jupyter Notebooks through to Azure Machine Learning Workbench. I will continue to add more videos over time. You can check out the full collection here. CNTK and Keras in Azure Notebooks Being doing some work with Keras recently, which is a fantastic platform for making it simple to build out neural networks. Even better, it abstracts the underlying framework and allows you to use the one of your choice such as Tensorflow or CNTK without having to change your Keras code. With a simple config change you can switch the backend. Seamless Migration to Azure SQL Database with the Database Migration Service Back in May, at the Build conference, Microsoft announced a new service - the Azure Database Migration Service. Now the service is available in public preview. It is the quickest and easiest way to migrate on-premises databases into the cloud. The new service uses a simple, guided process to streamline the migration and allow for current operations to continue while the migration is happening. A Lap Around Some Machine Learning Frameworks Below I have highlighted some of the commonly used, open source, machine learning frameworks you will find in use today. The Secrets of Magic or Using PROSE to transform JSON Sometimes you come across something that just blows you away. I had this experience recently with the Program Synthesis by Example functionality in the newly release Azure Machine Learning Workbench. Azure Machine Learning Workbench Azure just released a set of updates to Azure Machine Learning. Check out all the details here.There were three new launches: Using Azure Event Grid to Monitor Deployments Azure just released a cool new service call Azure Event Grid. Azure Event Grid manages all routing of events from any source, to any destination, for any application. It essentially puts events as first class citizens in the ecosystem. Built with a serverless model, it allows you to wire up eventing to perform “shoulder taps” when events happen to trigger downstream processing. Using Azure Custom Decision Service To Drive Recommendations I wanted to spice up this blog a little bit with some intelligence. If you notice, on the left (or at the top), there is now a list of recommended articles you might like. This is driven by machine learning algorithms on the backend powered by the Azure Custom Decision Service. This service uses reinforcement learning to personalize the list of links based on your behavior. This means that other users reading the same article may see a different set of recommended articles. The service adapts the list of recommendations to maximize the overall engagement of users. Using AMQP with Azure Service Bus and Python Azure Service Bus does support the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) 1.0 protocol. It is a comprehensive messaging protocol and is typically used where reliability and interoperability are key. It provides a wide range of messaging features such as reliable queuing, publish-subscribe, transactions etc. Creating Context with Microsoft QNAmaker If you have not checked out Microsoft’s qnamaker then you should. “From FAQ to Bot in minutes” - quite literally. You can sign up, give it an FAQ to ingest, wait a minute or so for it to train and then you will be given a REST endpoint to which you can POST natural language questions. You can quickly incorporate this into a bot using the Azure Bot Framework or even incorporate it into other web applications. How To Build a Bot with Azure I have created a simple, proof of concept bot that leverages the following Azure services: Azure Bot Service Microsoft Cognitive Service – Text Analytics Microsoft Cognitive Services – LUIS Azure Search Azure Functions How To Scale Azure SQL Data Warehouse in Azure Data Factory You can use Azure SQL Data Warehouse as part of your Azure Data Factory pipeline which is great, but you probably don’t want to have the data warehouse running at the maximum Data Warehouse Units (DWU) all the time, especially if the pipeline is not running on a frequent basis. I want to share with you some steps to enable scaling up and scaling down of SQL Data Warehouse right within your Data Factory pipeline. Using Azure Functions to extract named entities from news articles Recently a custom visual was released for Power BI that enabled browsing and analyzing collections of text. These visuals can provide a powerful set of tools for analysis. Extracting data out of Excel Files using Azure Batch and Azure Data Factory Sometimes you have a requirement to get data out of Excel files as part of your data ingestion process. Perhaps the business users create reports in Excel and then send them to you on a regular basis. Unfortunately though, there is not always a great mechanism to extract data out of Excel files, especially if you want to use the data as part of a data processing pipeline with Azure Data Factory. In this post I outline an approach to leverage and extract data out of Excel files as part of an Azure Data Factory pipeline. Using Azure Batch to unzip large number of files If you ever have a need to unzip a large number of files that are sitting in Azure Storage then one option is to use Azure Batch. In this post I will show how easy it is to create an application that leverages Azure Batch to unzip files sitting in Azure Storage and place the extracted files back into Azure Storage. A full working solution is available on my github repository here. Using Azure Functions to clean up Azure Data Factory When you build out a pipeline using Azure Data Factory you will have to associate it to a storage account. If, as part of your pipeline you are running certain jobs such as a HDInsight On Demand job it will, for each slice run, generate a container in the storage account for that run. This is great for debugging, but if you run a pipeline for any extensive period of time these job containers build up and you need a way to periodically purge them. Typically you will see the adf job container be called something like: adfname_of_factory-name_of_ondemand_service-timestamp Using Azure Resource Manager templates for deploying Drupal 7 This post is about automating deployment into Azure for Drupal 7. This will focus on leveraging Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and ARM templates to define the infrastructure as well as wire up the continous deployment processes. Azure Resource Manager template apiVersion If you have been working with Azure Resoure Manager templates then you will have come across the need for apiVersion property on all resources. You will also have noticed that this is not consistent between resources. Using Azure Data Factory To Count Word Frequency In Tweets Today I am going to walk though creating a simple analytical pipeline using Azure Data Factory. The Azure Data Factory service is a fully managed service for composing data storage, data processing, and data movement services into streamlined, scalable, and reliable data production pipelines. Migrating from AWS to Azure using Azure Site Recovery With Azure Site Recovery you can migrate VMs from Physical Servers to Azure. This opens up a variety of useful use cases such as Migrating instances from AWS to Azure Having a Azure as a failover site for AWS instances. Sync Git master with fork I recently had to fork a branch in github and then I had to figure out how to keep the changes from the master in sync with the fork branch I had made. Turns out it is really simple. Netflix IMDB Chrome Extension I created a simple Chrome extension today to make things a little easier when browsing Netflix. I always find myself having to go to IMDB.com to go and check out a movie’s rating when I am looking for something to watch on Netflix. With this extension I bring that rating right into Netflix, meaning one less click for me. Not Just Code Monkeys Martin Fowler’s presention on building healthy, social environments where software development can thrive is interesting. Planning Poker Made Easy Often I work with remotely distributed teams where some (or all) of the team members are remote and attend meetings virtually. The other day, during a planning games session, a few of the team members were remote and so, in order to facilitate the planning poker sessions, we looked for a web site that would provide the option for the team to all vote within a virtual room. Panel Jumping On Collapse I added a bootstrap panel to a webpage with collapsing sections. The requirement was for each panel to remain open until it was specifically closed. This worked fine, however, I noticed that on closing the panel there would appear to be a jump effect which did not look nice at all. Remove Git Repo Configuration and History Step 1: Remove all historyrm -rf .gitStep 2: Reconstruct the Git repositorygit initgit add .git commit -m "Initial commit"Step 3: push to GitHub.git remote add origin <github-uri>git push -u --force origin master BREACH Attack Back in August 2013, at the Blackhat conference, security researchers Angelo Prado, Neal Harris and Yoel Gluck announced BREACH. SSL and Web Security It is worth noting that SSL is only one piece of your web security. It offers a great way to protect your data as it flows between the client and the server as well as providing a check to ensure the server is who you think it is but it is only a piece of the security puzzle. Often people will think just by having SSL enabled their site is now secure but this is just not the case. Visual Studio Test Controllers Cross Domain I have setup some test controllers and was struggling to hit them remotely from my local machine. The main issue was because my local machine was in one domain and the controllers were in another domain. After lots of fruitless googling I came eventually came across this simple solution. Update to the Hacker News App I have finally finished some updates on my first foray into Windows 8 apps. Last summer I uploaded, to the Windows Store, version 1 of my Hacker News App which, using the bigrss feed from Hacker News, displayed the top stories from the popular tech news aggregator. It was pretty basic - it showed comments for each story and allowed the viewer to view the original story. For release 2 I added a couple of new features that I think will make it more useful as well as made a couple of bug fixes and UX improvements. JavaScript Allonge So I recently finished reading JavaScript Allonge. This is a great book, with recipes for JavaScript that are explained simply yet effectively.It provides recipes for functions that are clean and straightforward to follow. You can even get a JavaScript library which contains all the functions outlined in the book at allong.es. Cleaning up IIS Virtual Directories with PowerShell Sometimes, especially if you are working with a large amount of web applications or different versions of the same application, you find IIS gets cluttered with all the different web applications. It is quite tedious to go through and delete different ones when you want to clean up. I created this simple powershell script to allow you to remove web applications from a specified website within IIS from the command line. Creating a Windows 8 Application My application can be found in the Windows store. Learning Node I have been starting to make more and more forays into JavaScript and decided to bite the bullet and look into one of the more popular javascript libraries that allow a full application to be built, end to end with JavaScript. First was deciding what I was going focus on. Initially I started to look at backbone.js but discovered that really, backbone.js was more for handling your view layer better. You still needed some form of server side components. Looking for something more, I turned to node.js. Their website proclaims: Learning Git When writing software you are, very quickly, going to run into the need to have some form of source control. It is just inevitable. You might start off, on your own, creating copies of your files in different folders- the poor man’s version control. Very soon you will make changes and think “crap!”, wishing you could revert back to yesterday, or two days ago. But it is too late, there is no history. There isn’t much of anything - except your last saved version and your 3 month old deployed version. You need some control. Source Control in fact.
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