Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

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Booch's career has spanned several significant eras in the history of computing. His anecdotes from his time working with various companies and technologies provide a unique glimpse into the evolution of the field. Insights The Booch method and C++ developed in parallel and influenced each other. Booch and Bjarne Stroustrup (the creator of C++) even did a lecture series together in the United States. UML was initially conceived as a way to unify three prominent object-oriented methodologies: Booch, Object Modeling Technique (OMT), and Objectory. This led to the collaboration of Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh, and Ivar Jacobson. Booch believes that the shift from UML 1.0 to 2.0, which focused on making UML a precise programming language, was a mistake. He intended UML to be a visual language for reasoning about, visualising, specifying, and documenting software systems, not for generating code . " the entire history of software engineering is one of rising levels of abstraction...

This Week I Learned -  * Github offers:  free private repos free minutes for GitHub Actions and GitHub Codespaces free package and release storage GitHub Copilot Free - 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month (new) with a choice between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT-4o model.  * With the analysis tool toggled on in feature preview, the new Claude 3.5 Haiku can now directly analyze Excel files to pull data, evaluate formulas, recreate a formatted spreadsheet as an Artifact. It can interpret large spreadsheets up to 30MB for instant insights. * Query on ChatGPT requires 8-10x more power than Google: N Venu, MD & CEO, India and South Asia, Hitachi Energy * Qlik provides a data integration, analytics, and artificial intelligence platform. Gartner has recognized Qlik as a Leader in Analytics and BI platforms for the IC straight year.  * The recommended amount of water intake is 2.5 to 3.5 liters per day, which should be spread out throu...

Slack's search modifiers are quite similar to Gmail's search operators. To find all posts by a user in Slack, go to the Search Bar: At the top of Slack, you’ll see a search bar (or press Ctrl+F on Windows or Cmd+F on Mac). Use the from: Search Modifier: Type: from:@username Replace @username with the actual Slack handle of the user. Example: from:@ashok_kumar Refine Your Search (Optional): Channel-specific search: from: @username in: #channel-name Keyword-specific search: from:@username keyword Date range: from:@username before:2024-01-01 Press Enter and you’ll see a list of all messages posted by that user. Use Ctrl + / to toggle the Keyboard Shortcuts panel while in GMail the shortcut is the combination of the Shift + / keys. Have a similar pattern makes the user experience better.

This Week I Learned -   * Addy Osmani open-source   web app lets you upload your image and let AI remove the background instantly. It uses Transformers.js which has enabled a whole class of client-side AI apps to come to the web. This is free for unlimited use (Canva is free for first-time) and does all processing locally and privately (nothing is uploaded to anyone’s servers). All of the processing happens client side. This means outside of just the bandwidth to serve the page itself there’s no cost to the person hosting it. * AI assistance in Chrome DevTools is now available with Chrome 131 * Instagram recently moved from Python 2 to Python 3. Dropbox also recently upgraded fully to Python 3 * OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji's article on how generative AI products violate copyrighted material. * AI Tier will replace backends - Satya Nadella *  Azure AI Agent Service is a fully managed service designed to empower developers to securely build, deploy, and...

Datawrapper is an online data visualization tool available at datawrapper.de that lets you create charts, maps and tables. Here's the list of the different visualizations you can create - Bar Chart Stacked Bars Grouped Bars Split Bars Bullet Bars Column Chart Stacked Columns Grouped Columns Lines Multiple Lines Area Chart Scatter Plot Dot Plot Range Plot Arrow Plot Election Donut Pie Chart Multiple Pies Donut Chart Multiple Donuts Choropleth map Symbol map Locator map Table It is self-funded by its customers’ subscription revenue. It also provides a good Free Plan .  The Datawrapper “Created with Datawrapper” attribution appears at the bottom of the chart if you use the free plan. However, you retain full copyright to your charts, maps, and tables. To remove the attribution, you’ll need to update to Custom or Enterprise plan. The Datawrapper River is a place to exchange charts and maps with other Datawrapper users. After adding a chart to the River, anyone can use it and customiz...

The Lock Screen on my Windows PC has started showing notifications with weather, air quality, stock information and today, Traffic status. Clicking on the notification led me to the Bing Maps Traffic page. I was pleasantly surprised to see a new service name - Microsoft Traffic and within the Traffic portal, the Insights tab contained useful local information that seemed better than what's on Google Maps. I was curious about how this is built and after exploring a bit, I found that there are Bing API endpoints that are available for anyone interested in customizing this traffic information for their own applications.  Going by the documentation, the geographic coverage for India is relatively better than for most countries with coverage for Road Data/Routing, Traffic & Geocoding though not for Truck Routing. The Bing Maps API which powers this Traffic status feature will be replaced by Azure Maps .  Azure Maps is expected to bring many of the Azure security and comp...

This Week I Learned -  * In 2019, a team of Google researchers said they had built a machine capable of performing tasks that were not possible with traditional supercomputers. They described this machine, called a quantum computer, as a turning point in the evolution of information technology. Google said its quantum computer, based on a computer chip called Willow, needed less than five minutes to perform a mathematical calculation that one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers could not complete in 10 septillion years, a length of time that exceeds the age of the known universe. Quantum computing — the result of decades of research into a type of physics called quantum mechanics — is still an experimental technology. - NYT * Daylight saving time was first adopted as a wartime measure in 1942. Setting clocks forward one hour in the spring and back an hour in the fall is intended to maximise daylight during summer months but has long been subject to scrutiny. Some healt...

Key takeaways from the talk in Q&A format - What is GitHub Copilot and how does it work? GitHub Copilot is a suite of tools designed for code completion. It works by analysing the code and comments you type in your IDE and sending that context to GitHub. Copilot then uses OpenAI's language model (in December 2024, it is GPT 4o by default and you can also choose the preview versions of o1-mini & o1-preview if you like) to understand your intent and generate suggestions for code completion. You can then accept, reject, or modify these suggestions. What context does GitHub Copilot consider when making suggestions? Copilot considers the entirety of the file you are currently working on, not just the code from your cursor position upwards. It also analyses the content of other open tabs in your IDE, starting with those closest to the current tab. This helps Copilot focus on the most relevant information. Is it necessary to meticulously manage open tabs for Copilot to work effect...

Essential AI prompts for developers *  Github Learning Roadmap   *  Introduction to GitHub CoPilot  (March 2023) - 6 videos * GitHub YouTube Channel  Playlist of videos on GitHub Copilot *  Essentials of Copilot  - A Github Learning Pathway module *  Unlock GitHub Copilot’s Full Potential: Advanced Features You’re Overlooking! *  GitHub Copilot Series - Visual Studio Code YouTube Channel Playlist *  Mastering GitHub Copilot for AI Paired Programming   *  Github Copilot Certification Exam Prep with Curated Resource Pack, Practice Questions and Answers with Reasoning : Core Knowledge & Responsible AI Copilot Features & Data Handling Prompt Engineering & Productivity Testing, Security & Privacy Also see -  Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming: With GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT

This Week I Learned -   * “Over time, the architectural diagram is mirrored in the org chart of the organization that designs and builds it.” - James Gosling , the creator of Java, refers to himself as a "Software Engineer"  *  Azure DevOps has been the end-to-end DevOps platform for Microsoft since it replaced Team Foundations Server, but in 2018, Microsoft purchased GitHub and also launched GitHub Actions. This session from PASS Data Community Summit 2023 explains how to set up a CI/CD workflow in GitHub Actions and how GitHub Actions is different that Azure DevOps Pipelines . * Real-time inference means that your deployed model is constantly available on one or several instances, ready to process any data at any moment. Using Batch Deployment rather than processing requests individually in real-time , batch processing can be implemented where data is processed in groups and stored in a database on a regular basis. Open Food Facts processed and spellchecked 10...

Leaderboards test a models' ability to perform across diverse tasks, including factual accuracy, general knowledge, reasoning, and ethical alignment. YouTube Benchmarks explainer - bycloud They incorporate benchmarks like MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding measures general academic and professional knowledge), TruthfulQA  (tests the truthfulness of responses), and HellaSwag (testing commonsense reasoning and natural language inference) to test different aspects of model performance. *  Stanford Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM) Leaderboard  - A reproducible and transparent framework for evaluating foundation models. These leaderboards cover many scenarios, metrics, and models with support for multimodality and model-graded evaluation. *  Artificial Analysis provides benchmarking and related information to support people & organizations in choosing the right model for their use-case and which provider to use for that model. *  Ch...

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The list of sessions & key takeaways - AI-powered transformation: Driving innovation and reshaping organizations - Joana Carrasqueira, Senior Manager, AI Developer Relations, Google (15:09) Building with the Gemini API and Google AI Studio - Shrestha Basu Mallick, Product Lead, Gemini API and AI Studio, Google (23:58) The presentation introduced the Gemini API and AI Studio, highlighting several key features and capabilities.  Multimodal Input: Gemini models support a variety of input modalities, including text, images, audio, and video .  Gemini offers an exceptionally large context window of 2 million tokens , which enables users to process extensive amounts of data, such as entire code bases, large document sets, or long videos. This feature allows for applications like sales representatives having access to all product information when interacting with customers. Context caching is also available, which can significantly lower costs when repeatedly using the same c...

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. - Disraeli. The book " How to Lie with Statistics ", first published in 1954, is an attention grabbing title for what should have really been called "A Guide to Spotting Statistical Trickery" This book exposes common statistical manipulations used to mislead audiences. The author explains in a light-hearted way through its ten chapters how to critically evaluate statistical claims and avoid being deceived by distorted data. In this age of both human & AI driven misinformation, this book is more relevant than ever. Chapter 1: The Sample with the Built-in Bias Trick: Presenting data based on a biased sample that doesn't accurately represent the population it claims to reflect. For example, using a sample of Yale graduates with known addresses to determine the average income of all Yale graduates. This method excludes those who may not be as financially successful, resulting in an inflated av...