Thought of the week Don’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. ...

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. ...

This is part 2 of my series on the metaverse, NFTs and more. Check out part 1, The Metaverse, Explained, Kind Of Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash Part 2: NFTs, Intrinsic Value and the New World Order It 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? ...

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. ...

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: ...

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: ...

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. ...

Highly recommended reading - How Artifical Intelligence is Reshaping Repression Some 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. ...

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 ...

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. ...