Category: Software Engineering

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…

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…