Take charge of growing your career
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” -Lewis Carroll Where are you going in your career? What is your plan? Nobody cares more about your career growth than YOU….
Business value, not technology, drives project success
I’ve been reflecting on past projects and where we have had challenges. The biggest challenges have been when project teams were solely focused on technology instead of the business value of their project. Lewis Carroll…
Beware the allure of rewriting code
I was recently reading some code and there was a subroutine that felt about twice as long as it should have been. As I pondered this subroutine, and wondered why nobody rewrote a shorter version…
Work in progress delivers no value
One of the key tenets of the Agile/Lean method of delivering software is the concept of reducing time to value. This is done with a laser-focus on value – simply there is no value from…
The trickiest bug I faced this year and what it taught me
A quick story about a seemingly simple bug that drove me nuts? (Though, don’t they all?) The story begins with a sorting bug in Java. Comparable is the Java interface that lets you compare two…
Book Review: Your Code as a Crime Scene
Over the holiday break I read Your Code as a Crime Scene: Use Forensic Techniques to Arrest Defects, Bottlenecks, and Bad Design in Your Programs by Adam Tornhill. I was drawn by the title – after…
The 5 most important things I’ve ever read
I’m excited to share these important and life-changing texts with you! I hope they are as helpful to you as they were to me. #1 How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie…
Introduction to chat bots with Watson Conversation Service
Introduction Chat bots are a powerful way to put a natural language interface in front of your applications and services, to help users easily and naturally get what they need. In this post I will…
How to organize documents when digitizing them
Introduction In my previous post I talked about why good document organization matters for cognitive systems and I outlined a few of the challenges of organizing scanned documents. In this post, I will cover some potential solutions…
What does your cognitive system know about your documents, and why does it matter?
I work with clients who want to use cognitive computing to extract insights locked away in their data. This data generally comes from a large volume and wide variety of source documents – thousands or…