2025-07-28

2025-07-28 Monday - Learning Resources for Agentic AI

 

[image credit: geralt on pixabay.com]

Learning Resources for Agentic AI

A former colleague recently asked me for some suggested resources on learning about Agentic AI...this blog post is a placeholder as I organize my thoughts.

Status: Work-In-Progress 

 

Upcoming conferences & webinars:

 

 

Suggested Books: 

[Caveat: I Have not read these yet. Listed in order of expected value for the reader...]

 

Some Interesting Videos | Articles:

 

Suggested Research Papers:

In no particular order, touching on a number of design considerations, security, risks, or limitations

  

Case Studies:

 

Agentic AI Protocols

  

Akka Enterprise Agentic AI  

"Akka is a platform for building, running and evaluating agentic systems. It includes a framework, runtime, streaming engine, and memory store for creating any kind of agentic system: AI, autonomous, real-time, adaptive, transactional, analytical, or edge. The Akka Runtime is the most widely adopted actor-based runtime in the world, enabling high-throughput, stateful services that are resilient, elastic and responsive. Akka runs on any infrastructure: public cloud, private cloud or on-premises."

 


Spring AI

"Spring AI is an application framework for AI engineering. Its goal is to apply to the AI domain Spring ecosystem design principles such as portability and modular design and promote using POJOs as the building blocks of an application to the AI domain."

 

Addendums

2025-08-01 Friday:  
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2025-06-16

2025-06-16 Monday - The Tools of an Artisan

These are some fine new additions to my woodworking toolbox:
[Nicholson WoodChuck 4-in-1 Combination Chisel/Wood Rasp (3-Piece)]

[image credit: The Home Depot]

 

Today's meditation:
You can learn much by studying the tools used by an artisan.

I have a love affair with great tools.
I love to build & repair things.
But especially, repairing broken things.

It is a gift I inherited from my father.

This has been a boon in the professional consulting work that I sometimes do: Repairing an architecture, a process, a design, a team, or an organization.

It wasn't until I became the owner of my first sailboat (at the time, a 31 year old boat, that had seen better days...a 1971, 32 ft. Islander sloop, made by Wayfarer Yachts) - that I really began organizing my tools into separate toolboxes, by use/purpose. Maintaining an aging ocean voyaging vessel is a special kind of love affair...and many things often break.

Today, I have seven primary toolboxes. There are some tools that I intend to use for decades, and am careful about their selection and quality. Other tools, are sometimes just for a one-time use.

To say I am particular about my tools, would be an understatement.

I feel the same way about the tools I use in my professional work...but regrettably, I am often forced to use the tools that are already selected by a team, or an organization.

It has been my observation that many folks try to effect a repair job - without the proper tool. Often, much frustration ensues. Sometimes, injuries - or damages - will occur, as a result.

There are many corollaries, in the work that we do in IT.

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2025-06-15

2025-06-15 Sunday - Advice to Those Starting Their Professional IT Career

[image credit: Seaq68 on Pixabay.com]

 

There are many various bits of advice I might give someone that is just starting their professional IT career...but I'm going to offer this advice, first:

  • Incorporate a fitness regimen into your DAILY life - and maintain it, no matter what.
  • The nature of IT work is often far too sedentary. The consequences will slowly accrete.  
  • Regular exercise will also provide time away from the keyboard - where you will often find those "Aha!" moments.  
  • Additionally, regular exercise will lift your mood, help you manage stress better, and the quality of your sleep will be greatly improved. 
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2025-06-09

2025-06-09 Monday - Operations Research: Optimization Algorithms, Background Reading

A LinkedIn post today, by Oleksandr Kaleniuk (author of Manning's Geometry for Programmers book), mentioned a book ("Optimization Algorithms: AI techniques for design, planning, and control problems",  2024 - also see the companion GitHub repository for the book)

... that led me on a brief diversion, researching other books, articles, and journals on optimization algorithms for Operations Research

This blog post is a placeholder, as I continue to collect interesting citations. 

References: 

 

Journals:  

 

Possibly Interesting Books:  

(in a somewhat arbitrary suggested order of possible interest/value) 

  • High-Dimensional Probability: An Introduction with Applications in Data Science (Cambridge Series in Statistical and Probabilistic Mathematics, Series Number 47) 1st Edition (2018) 
    • 4.7 stars, 74 reviews 
    • "High-dimensional probability offers insight into the behavior of random vectors, random matrices, random subspaces, and objects used to quantify uncertainty in high dimensions. Drawing on ideas from probability, analysis, and geometry, it lends itself to applications in mathematics, statistics, theoretical computer science, signal processing, optimization, and more. It is the first to integrate theory, key tools, and modern applications of high-dimensional probability. Concentration inequalities form the core, and it covers both classical results such as Hoeffding's and Chernoff's inequalities and modern developments such as the matrix Bernstein's inequality. It then introduces the powerful methods based on stochastic processes, including such tools as Slepian's, Sudakov's, and Dudley's inequalities, as well as generic chaining and bounds based on VC dimension. A broad range of illustrations is embedded throughout, including classical and modern results for covariance estimation, clustering, networks, semidefinite programming, coding, dimension reduction, matrix completion, machine learning, compressed sensing, and sparse regression."  

 

Other Books:  

(in a somewhat arbitrary suggested order of possible interest/value)  

 

Commercial Optmization Solutions:  

 

Open Source Optimization Solutions: 

  • Google OR-Tools 
    • https://github.com/google/or-tools 
    • "OR-Tools is an open source software suite for optimization, tuned for tackling the world's toughest problems in vehicle routing, flows, integer and linear programming, and constraint programming."
    • "After modeling your problem in the programming language of your choice, you can use any of a half dozen solvers to solve it: commercial solvers such as Gurobi or CPLEX, or open-source solvers such as SCIP, GLPK, or Google's GLOP and award-winning CP-SAT."   
    • License:  Apache 2.0

 

Optimization Competitions:  

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2025-06-05

2025-06-05 Thursday - Notes on Testing Schools of Thought

Status: work-in-progress 

Unless a business is in a highly regulated industry (and required, by regulation or standards - to establish separate testing teams), I do not believe it is generally beneficial to have a separate Testing/QA team - it simply creates yet another hand-off, and a gating function, that delays delivery of business value. 

If agile and DevOps practices are followed, the delivery team developers should be responsible for their own testing - and with CI/CD practices - testing should be automated to the maximum extent possible. 

This is a placeholder blog post to organize links to articles, books, and talks... 

Dave Thomas:

 

Dave Farley:  

Emily Bache: 

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2025-05-15

2025-05-15 Thursday - Book Review - Building Quantum Software in Python: A developer's guide

 

 

[image source: Amazon.com]

 
Building Quantum Software in Python: A developer's guide
by Constantin Gonciulea, and Charlee Stefanski

Review: 

An excellent book that will walk you through the principles, concepts, theory, and practical techniques of building quantum computing software, with Python. 

The quality of the writing is "crisp" - a word of praise I reserve for the best authors.

 

Full Disclosure:

I was invited to participate in early manuscript reviews, by Constantin.




 

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2025-04-13

2025-04-13 Sunday - Suggested Event Sourcing Background Reading

This a placeholder for organizing interesting Event Sourcing related background reading content. 

Status: Work-in-progress...

 

A LinkedIn post today, by Sam Hatoum (Founder, Auto - , spurred me to assemble some suggested background reading notes for folks that may be interested in Event Sourcing:

   

JavaScript: 

  • Emmett: 
    • "Emmett is an opinionated yet flexible framework that implements Event Sourcing for Node.js applications. It focuses on composition rather than magic, providing lightweight abstractions and clear patterns that make Event Sourcing accessible and maintainable."

 

Interesting Talks on YouTube

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