Author: Chad Michel

We write a lot of applications that automate backend processes. These are typically applications that can be a little rough in terms of their user experience because they only function for a few (and often more technically savvy) users. These applications are often heavily data-driven, which is why they usually start in Excel before we…

I wrote about AWS CodeStar in my previous post. I was impressed by what it can provide developers. With just a few clicks, you get a fully functional API running in a serverless hosting environment (AWS Lambda), and you get a full build/deploy pipeline to boot. But how can you add another API endpoint after…

I have blogged a bit about AWS Lambdas in the past. We sometimes use AWS Lambas + API Gateway + other AWS services to create the backend services for our applications. My previous experience with getting this set up and running was kind of a pain, and getting it running locally was even more of…

There are many solutions for face recognition. Azure and AWS both provide cloud-based solutions that can be consumed. However, there are other options that don’t require a cloud provider. One of these is OpenCV. In this blog post, we will explore using OpenCV to do some basic face recognition. The steps for pretty much all…

Ensuring everyone has the same conventions is important; it helps to keep all the code looking like it was developed with one mind. But doing so is a lot of work. I don’t know how many pull request comments I have seen along the lines of “this should be Pascal Case, not Camel Case”. Way…

Azure’s cognitive APIs are pretty impressive. We did a series of blog posts on the Azure Faces API, but today we are going to look at the Computer Vision API overall. And we’ll see that their APIs are good for doing other things with images as well. With Azure’s generic Vision API, we can glean…

Text analysis can potentially be very powerful. The ability to judge text as positive or negative is very interesting. This would obviously be a very powerful tool for analyzing things such as blog comments or product review comments (“Are people giving us positive or negative feedback on our product?”). So lucky for us, Text Analytics…

When looking at a photo, we can often tell how happy a person is, or you can at least make a good guess. But determining if a person is happy based on facial expressions is no longer just for humans. Azure’s Face API also supports letting Azure make that guess. Let’s dive in and see…

In my previous post, we wrote some code to determine if we had Doug in an image. But we were not comparing Doug against anyone else. Now it’s time to make a small tweak to train the system to recognize Doug when we give it an image of someone else – like Bill. The code…

Azure’s Face API is pretty amazing. In my previous blog post, we saw that Face can identify a human face in any image we feed it. In this blog post, we will find Doug’s in a picture. We won’t test this very extensively here; we are going to start with a pretty simple example. The…