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21 July 2016 08:38

Google just launched its BETA (for Google products are mostly infinitely in beta stage) of the natural language API. For now it can work with English, Spanish or Japanese. You can use it to extract information from the text automatically about places, events, people and more to build decisions based on that models.
https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/
https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/20/google-launches-new-api-to-help-you-parse-natural-language/

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19 July 2016 19:02

Microsoft has published REST API design guidelines they use inside the company. Defenetely worth reading: http://dev.office.com/blogs/rest-api-design-guidelines

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15 July 2016 10:22

Seems like a nice resource for training in AI: https://gym.openai.com/ . There are samples with agents that can play pong and go.
OpenAI Gym is compatible with algorithms written in any framework, such as Tensorflow and Theano. The environments are written in Python, but we'll soon make them easy to use from any language. We originally built OpenAI Gym as a tool to accelerate our own RL research. We hope it will be just as useful for the broader community.

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14 July 2016 08:14

AFTER LOSING ON MOBILE, CAN MICROSOFT WIN THE NEXT BATTLE?
AI / NCL are trends right now (personally I think that they are more closer to average people, unlike IOT, as a services, of course, not as complex math models), so this longread should be interesting to read.
Microsoft argues that it has the best "brain," built on nearly two decades of advancements in machine learning and natural language processing, for delivering a future powered by artificial intelligence. It has a head start in building bots that resonate with users emotionally, thanks to an early experiment in China. And among the giants, Microsoft was first to release a true platform for text-based chat interfaces — a point of pride at a company that was mostly sidelined during the rise of smartphones.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/7/12111028/microsoft-bot-framework-artificial-intelligence-satya-nadella-interview

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13 July 2016 21:19

To comment or not to comment... Yes, its personal, but the advice to write small micro functions with proper naming for the single action is really good practice for proper design of the whole modules. So.. If you can write the comments for some block of code - may be its better to refactor it into a method with proper title that is reflecting the previously written comments (sure it does ;))?
https://blog.codinghorror.com/coding-without-comments/

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08 July 2016 07:35

You wanted to know if regular programming can be rocket science?.. Here you go: source code of the original Apollo 11 mission on GitHub https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11

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01 June 2016 09:03

The talk is a bit old, but this does not mean that its not actual!

It's not what you read, it's what you ignore - Video of Scott Hanselman's Personal Productivity Tips.

I've done a number of talks on Productivity in the past. Lots of folks ask me what my tips are for being productive. I've taken all those tips as well as tips from Kathy Sierra, Stephen Covey, David Allen, The Pomodoro Technique and many more and aggregated them into a system that works well for me. I talk about how to effectively handle large amounts email, sorting your personal data stream, how to conserve your keystrokes, the "one email rule" that you need to be effective

I'm giving this talk in a few places in the coming months like StirTrek in Ohio, DevCon in Russia, and possibly "That Conference" in Wisconsin. If you will be attending one of these events, you might want to wait and see it in person. ;)

There's a few jokes in the beginning of the talk that refer back to some discussion about Gamification and a funny back and forth that Kathy Sierra and I had. If they don't make sense, that's the context.

https://vimeo.com/39020426

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19 May 2016 16:32

Redis running on an entry level laptop can scan a 1 million key database in 40 milliseconds... Sounds nice -> we decided to use Redis as a cache service on production. No issues for now, its durable and fast, has various administration abilities within single server(console/web interface where you can actually manage your saved data). You can consider the technology too, here is the entry level article for .NET developers on how to start: http://tostring.it/2015/03/05/all-you-need-to-know-about-redis/ . There is even StackExchange's wrapper for that thing: http://blog.marcgravell.com/2014/03/so-i-went-and-wrote-another-redis-client.html . Also here is the book for getting you started fast and nicely with understanding of key differences/similarities between several popular databases with different concepts inside: https://pragprog.com/book/rwdata/seven-databases-in-seven-weeks

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20 July 2016 09:22

A nice addition from Bitbucket: Git LFS (Large File Storage). Now we can store even large binaries without growing the size of the actual repository: bitbucket stores the large files in the cloud and the references to them in repository, so that when you are checking out some version - it will pull only the relevant binary for that version.

Why should you care about Git LFS?
Git was optimized for source – it’s easily merged and compressed and is relatively small, so it is perfectly feasible to store all history everywhere, but this makes it inefficient and slow when trying to track large binary files. For example, If your designer stores a 100 MB image in your Git repository and modifies it nine times, your repository could bloat to almost 1 GB in size, since binary deltas often compress poorly. Every developer, build agent, and deploy script cloning that repository would then have to download the full 1 GB history of changes, which may lead to drastically longer clone times. Just imagine what would have happened if your designer made 99 changes to that file.
https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/07/18/git-large-file-storage-now-in-bitbucket-cloud/

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17 July 2016 09:38

Here are not that obvious rules facts about threading in .NET. Saved the article, because there was a moment in my career when one of them saved me lots of time (bugs in multi-thread are sometimes hard to catch before going to production in case you don't normally understand the subject).

Have you ever spent a few hours on trying to debug a non-deterministic problem occurring in your multi-threading application? If so, then you should definitely read this article. If not it is anyway a good way of revising your current knowledge about threading challenges in C#. Being aware of some common facts about threading can help you considerably in building well-designed, error-proof multi-threading applications in the future.
http://blog.goyello.com/2014/01/21/threading-in-c-7-things-you-should-always-remember-about/

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15 July 2016 08:50

Epic article about how relational databases work in general. Easy to read and VERY valuable, just because of the fact that in depth there is too much academic math and raw documentations where you must know what are you searching for when you are reading it (sure its OK, but not for newbies). http://coding-geek.com/how-databases-work/

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14 July 2016 05:28

Not directly related to the IT, but related to the information we need to process. Rush is almost always a loose when you want to understand and learn something new. The bad news is that we are already spoiled by 'scanning' through Facebook/Twitter posts.
With 1,500 – 2,000 TV shows aired, 600,000 – 1 million books published, 1 billion active websites & approximately 200 billion tweets posted every year, we live in a world packed with information. In our pockets, a thumb-press away, we carry libraries so vast that even imagining them would be an impossibility... https://blog.todoist.com/2016/04/25/read-less-learn-more/

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13 July 2016 20:59

Some recommendations for the developers of any skillset:
Try https://www.manning.com/books/c-sharp-in-depth-third-edition
in case the "depth" is the right word for your curiosity in C#.
If you're a .NET developer, you'll use C# whether you're building an advanced enterprise application or just slamming out a quick app. In C# 5 you can do amazing things with generics, lambda expressions, dynamic typing, LINQ, iterator blocks, and other features. But first you have to learn it in depth.

C# in Depth, Third Edition has been thoroughly revised to cover the new features of C# 5, including the subtleties of writing maintainable asynchronous code. You'll see the power of C# in action, learning how to work with high-value features that you'll be glad to have in your toolkit. And you'll learn to avoid hidden pitfalls of C# programming with the help of crystal clear explanations of "behind the scenes" issues.

In short: this one is the best human readable book about the language from the #1 stackoverfloow .NET superhero Jon Skeet.

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15 June 2016 11:02

A nice article in russian about a story of indie game company, who tried to be self published in XBOX/Steam Greenlight
https://m.habrahabr.ru/post/302848

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21 May 2016 12:50

Yay, useful open text editor added useful feature! Notepad++ had tail function now: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/notepad-6.9.2-released.html

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03 May 2016 20:02

Microsoft is bringing a very large scale redesign to old MSDN-like documentation pages! Here is the article with explanations of the decisions made: https://docs.microsoft.com/teamblog/introducing-docs-microsoft-com/