Glavs Blog

2019 has been a rather challenging year for myself, family and friends. Normally, as I did last year, I would list the goals I had made for myself, then list the ones I had achieved, not achieved and changed. This was mostly technology related with a few exceptions. This year was different and as a result, this post will be a little different. However, it would be of little value to anyone if I didn't call out the learnings from the year, so that others may possibly benefit, relate or even be able to utilise in some way.

Azure Cognitive services are a powerful, consumer friendly set of API's that allow developers to easily make use of powerful artificial intelligence and machine learning services within their applications. Services such as text recognition, sentiment analysis, facial recognition and emotion detection to name a few. You can go check them out here.

This is a short post, partly so I can remember in the future and partly to also help others as silly as I was.

Last year, I wrote a post around how I semi plan my career and personal growth by writing 'The list'. I have been asked if I am doing this again so I thought it would be good to do just that, and allow me to publicly reflect on what worked, what didn't, and what I intend to do this year.

CosmosDb is the "planet scale" document storage (I love that term) schema-less (NoSQL) system that is offered by Microsoft Azure. It offers guaranteed performance based on how much throughput you select when provisioning it. This is measured using "Request Units" (RU's). It aims to offer virtually unlimited scalability and throughput through the use of partitioned collections spread across a series of high performance storage hardware (SSD's).

Many times when speaking with colleagues and friends I get asked "What should I concentrate on from a tech perspective?". This may be to plan some professional development, or to try and steer your career into where you want it go, or simply to provide some guidance around the myriad of things to look at in the tech world. I like to do this for both personal and career goals, but for this post I'll stick to tech. The technology landscape is huge and it can be hard to focus when there are so may things that are interesting. You do not want to spread yourself "too thin" either, and tackle too many things otherwise you will either never get to it or it will seem overwhelming.

Microsoft Azure API Management is a cloud hosted service provided by Microsoft to easily manage your API (Application programming interface) solutions. Azure API management allows you to easily secure, measure, configure and provision multiple API solutions at scale, to any downstream API you create.

We live in very exciting times. Computing capabilities have increased exponentially in the last two centuries to allow us to easily utilise highly complex artificial intelligence functionality today. It all began with the first mechanical computer in the early 19^th century by Charles Babbage. The concepts and work that resulted from that were iterated upon, which enabled the invention of the first programmable digital computer in the 1940s. Fast forward 70 years, and Artificial Intelligence is evolving into something that people can easily use, without having a degree in mathematics, access to enormous amounts of processing hardware or access to enormous amount of data.