2019-07-14 Sunday - New Consultation Call-Scheduling Service

*** Schedule a 1-hour Consultation ***

I've set-up an integrated calendar/scheduling service - to allow clients to schedule, and pay in advance, for one hour consultations - for those times when they may just need to get a quick answer/perspective from an expert.

Clients may also wish to leverage my expertise for brief consultations during a specific focus area of a design review, as part of a vendor discovery / technical evaluation call, to brainstorm architecture and technology roadmaps, or as a catalyst during an idea storming session to help generate a diverse set of alternative solution ideas.

I've also wanted to explore the possibility of offering these type of short consultations - as a way to provide career coaching and mentoring to fellow professionals in my industry. Think of me as an on-call "Personal River Guide" for the turbulent times that you may face in your career - from time-to-time.

The ability to have a confidential, trusted, adviser - who can offer an outsider's independent and objective perspective - can be invaluable - to executive leaders, managers, as well as staff.

While you may have had a mentor early in your career - as you've progressed and risen - it becomes more difficult, with every passing year - to find a peer (or, as is sometimes most needed - someone with more experience) that you can confidently turn to for confidential advice.

When you are under pressure to respond to the various sensitive situations that may arise during the course of a career - this consultation service can serve to help you navigate the turbulent waters.

Whether the challenge is some aspect of your own salary/compensation negotiations; preparing for a performance review; preparing for an important presentation/meeting; or seeking guidance on how to handle problems that can arise in politically-charged/sensitive relationships; or sketching out your personal professional development/improvement strategy to help you reach the next level - these are challenges that you need not face without a guide.

Photo by Rune Haugseng on Unsplash

2019-07-07 Sunday - Experimenting with RunKit

https://runkit.com/home

• "RunKit notebooks completely remove the friction of trying new ideas. With one click you'll have a sandboxed JavaScript environment where you can instantly switch node versions, use every npm module without having to wait to install it, and even visualize your results. No more configuration, just straight to coding."
• "Create an API without worrying about servers or configuration. Just export a endpoint function and your notebook automatically becomes an HTTPS endpoint, accessible from any app. Great for prototyping iOS and Android backends, or creating microservices."
• "RunKit makes it easy to let your users run the sample code in your blog posts and documentation right on your website."

console.log("Hello, I'm executing within the RunKit environment");

2019-07-04 Thursday - Visual Studio Code

Have you tried Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor yet?  If not - you should.

https://code.visualstudio.com/

For a long time, I was a strong supporter of the Eclipse IDE - and yet - the pain of broken plugins, and the rate of the rot & decay increasing - with the number of plugins that are not maintained - with the accelerated pace of releases - has led me to finally abandon it as my primary code editing tool.

I've often fallen back to using Notepad++ - which is a good enough tool - for the majority of any quick code editing tasks.

But, I've long wanted a better tool - with a robust and vibrant marketplace of community contributed plugins.

While other of my peers have indicated their preference for Sublime Text - I have settled on the most excellent Visual Studio Code editor.

The June 2019 (version 1.36) release - yet again - impresses me with the continued pace of improvements - ease of use - and ease of configuration.

 Opening a Go file - it was a seamless experience of the UI detecting and initiating the install process - automatically - for the 11 related plugins that were suggested.

2019-07-04 Thursday - Book To Read: Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge Sharing by Design

There is a never-ending tension between the perceived need for exhaustive documentation - and the cost/effort to produce/maintain it.

The level of need exists on a spectrum - and will vary depending on a number of requirement forces: Mortality Risks, Regulatory Compliance, Complexity of System Design and Integration, Accessibility to Source Code, Degree of Reliance/Integration with external/isolated Third-Party Systems, Degree of Dependencies between Manual vs. Automated Processes, etc.

There is no silver bullet - but I am constantly seeking out new ideas, techniques, strategies, and lessons-learned for optimizing this particularly challenging problem.

Cyrille Martraire has published a new book this year, "Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge Sharing by Design" - which I plan to add to my reading stack in the near future. Looking forward to reading his insights and suggestions.

2019-07-02 Tuesday - TensorFlow-2.0.0-beta1 MINST Demo

On Monday night, I upgraded my TensorFlow from the 2.0.0-alpha to 2.0.0-beta1

• https://www.tensorflow.org/beta/

The documentation suggests:

"The best place to start is with the user-friendly Sequential API. Create models by plugging together building blocks. Run this “Hello World” example"

References:

• http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/

My "Lab.ML" Github Repository folder: examples/TensorFlow/MINST_Demo/

• https://github.com/intltechventures/Lab.ML/tree/master/examples/TensorFlow/MINST_Demo

...with sample output: