Category: Software Engineering

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…

Azure is pretty amazing. It has services for almost everything. And did you know that Azure even has the ability to recognize faces? Azure Face is a pretty fantastic facial recognition service. Ten years ago, it would have seemed almost magical. But today, you can recognize faces in images using a cloud service with very…

As a software community, we suffer the fate of a million little cuts. We build systems built on top of other code, layers upon layers upon layers. And, unfortunately, each layer isn’t very solid. This last week while teaching some students, I ran into a seemingly small issue with an Azure Function. Azure Functions are…

The adage “Many hands make light work” is something we often take for granted. If we get a lot of people working together on a particular task, we can quickly knock it out. Think of stocking shelves as an example. The more people you have, the quicker you can unload a truck and get the…

Sometimes it isn’t easy to get everyone onto the same page. Everyone on a development team can think we are all moving in the same (and right) direction. Still, we often have different underlying assumptions about how certain features will be implemented. When we don’t have visibility into those assumptions, headaches can ensue. An excellent…

Despite the virtual nature of this year’s Microsoft Build developer conference, there were a lot of great updates and news to be shared. There’s no way I could cover everything in one post, so here are some of my favorite parts. Blazor There are few things in software I am hungrier for information about than…

When we ask someone to design something, we usually focus on the good. If you ask someone to build a notification service, it is expected to be a good one. But what about asking people to design a bad one? Asking participants to develop a poor design is what we do in our Software Design…

I like going back to take a fresh look at tools and technologies every once in a while. It is always interesting to see what has changed and what has stayed the same – especially mobile platforms because it feels like an area where there is a lot of room for improvement. I am very…