The Curious Programmer

Artificial intelligence has been in the background for decades, kicking up dust in the distance, but never quite arriving. Well that era is over. In 2017, AI has broken through the dust cloud and arrived in a big way. But why? What’s the big deal all of a sudden? And what do recurrent neural networks

Originally posted on The Curious Programmer:
This is a question that I get a lot, especially from co-workers or friends that are just beginning their journey as a software craftsman. What book should I read to become a better developer? Do I need to read books? I think it’s a great question, and it is one that…

(This is part 3 in a series of posts on artificial intelligence and deep learning/neural networks. You can check out part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t yet read them and are new to AI) There was a time when artificial intelligence was only home to our most creative imaginations. Yet, isn’t that where

Interest in artificial intelligence is reaching new heights. 2016 was a record year for AI startups and funding, and 2017 will certainly surpass it, if it hasn’t already. According to IDC, spending on cognitive systems and AI will rise more than 750% by 2020. Both interest and investment in AI spans the full spectrum of

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed Artificial Intelligence (AI) is popping up more and more in technology talks and business strategies. I’ve even noticed among my friends an increased interest in “cognifying” their applications. It’s easy to see why. Everyone is aware of the autonomous car revolution, and, if you are in

The world of programming is always changing. And changing FAST at that. We are constantly finding better ways to do what it is that we do. That is a great thing. Iteration is a very powerful concept. However, there are a few ideas and constructs in the computer science world that remain constant. Data structures and their

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about unit testing and its importance in developing quality software. You can find that here. A topic that is seen a lot when discussing unit testing is the idea of “mocking” objects (I’ll explain this in a second). I didn’t go into this in my unit testing post

Throughout my career (and life) I’ve been on many different teams. Obviously, this implies that I’ve been a teammate to others and had many teammates of my own. I bring this up because yesterday I had an interaction with a current teammate of mine that made me think “Wow, what a great person to work with.”

SPOILER ALERT: Yes. Code without tests is such an old idea that in his book “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” (written in 2004!) Michael Feather defines “Legacy Code” as code that is not accompanied by unit tests. This should be common knowledge by now in the software community, but I still am running into developers

If you know me personally, you know that I love to read. It started in grade school where the elementary school I attended offered points and prizes for those who read (and passed tests on) the most books every month. I remember I graduated with the 3rd most points in the history of the program (something