Category: software development
-
The research mindset
Back when I was working at Nuance Communications, we had a yearly internal research conference, in which people would share what they had been working on with other teams. Usually there were about 200 or so people at the conference, which was probably about 1/4 of all the people working in research. I got the…
-
non-generative AI should not be forgotten
I have been working on virtual assistants for 15 years now. The first ones I started with were IVR (interactive voice response). These were the phone systems with complicated dialogues. When I would mention it at a party, people would always respond “I hate those!”. Then Siri came out right around the same time, and…
-
90% is often the perfect amount
It is spring time where I live, which besides chirping birds and blooming flowers means also spring cleaning. In particular, I have spent at 10-20 hours over the last several weeks cleaning the paths in our back yard. Over the winter months, when we don’t use it much, moss, algae, and weeds start to grow…
-
Closures in PHPUnit dataProviders
Today I was working on a PHPUnit test at work for testing Elasticsearch. In this case, I wanted to make sure that the data that I was indexing was findable. Basically I wanted to run a search for a given query and check that the results were as expected. I wanted to run this search…
-
AI is not going to take over just yet
I wish I had blogged about this then, but I didn’t. Here’s an article from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) about how 2017 is going to be the year of the self-driving car. I would bet a dollar than no one reading this in 2023 has a fully self-driving car. I would…