Get the benefits of Apple’s ML tools server-side. SwiftUI client showing image classification results Recently, at Sovrn, we had an AI Hackathon where we were encouraged to experiment with anything related to machine learning. The Hackathon yielded some fantastic projects from across the company. Everything from SQL query generators to chatbots that can answer questions about our products and other incredible work. I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn more about Apple’s ML tools and maybe even build something with real business value. A few of my colleagues and I teamed up ..read more

I’m putting Better Programming on hiatus to make room for other programming publications. I get that this is a big pivot given that we switched to a new editor recently. But things are changing at Medium and I think this will ultimately be a boon for everyone, authors, readers and publications. I would like to inspire some (but not all) of you to start a publication and give you some guidelines on how to do it well. If you are an author, there are many other publications to write for and hopefully there will soon be even more (check the comments for suggestions). Medium has always had publicat ..read more

Image by AuthorUsing Python in a Jupyter notebook Many of you will know that every man and his dog are producing AI products or LLM’s and integrating them with their products. Not surprisingly AWS — the biggest cloud services provider — is also getting in on the act. What is bedrock? Its AI offering is called Bedrock and the following blurb from it’s website describes what Bedrock is. Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI ..read more

Image by AuthorPandas v Psycopg A Postgres database speed test. Who wins? Following on from a story I wrote comparing the speed of Pandas and Polars libraries in terms of reading and writing data — from and to — a Postgres database I thought it might be interesting to do a similar comparison between Pandas and Psycopg2. If you need to get data from or to a Postgres database table from or to a local file, read on for the winner. You can find the Pandas v Polars article at the link below: Pandas v Polars Pandas I don’t think I need to explain much about what Pandas is. I ..read more

Or, how scripting revolutionized my workflow Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash Imagine a time when factories were full of life, with gears turning and machines working together. It was a big change, like what’s happening today with computers. In the world of creating and managing software, we’re moving from doing things by hand to letting computers do the work. I’ve seen this change happen, and I can tell you, writing little programs, or “scripts,” is what’s making this change possible. Just like factories changed how things were made, these little programs are changing the way we ..read more

Emotional Architecture in Software Design Photo by Bret Kavanaugh on UnsplashThe Psychological Underpinnings of Software Development Imagine sitting down at your desk to untangle a particularly complex piece of software code. Your eyes scan lines packed with logical operations and function calls. Somewhere in this intricate weave, a bug lurks, derailing the application’s performance. This scenario, familiar to many developers, isn’t just a test of technical skill; it’s a psychological challenge. The frustration and cognitive fatigue that often accompany such tasks can cloud judgment ..read more

OpenAI’s backend converting messy unstructured data to structured data via functions OpenAI’s “Function Calling” might be the most groundbreaking yet under appreciated feature released by any software company… ever. What are GPT Functions Functions allow you to turn unstructured data into structured data. This might not sound all that groundbreaking but when you consider that 90% of data processing and data entry jobs worldwide exist for this exact reason, it’s quite a revolutionary feature that went somewhat unnoticed. Have you ever found yourself begging GPT (3.5 or 4) to spit out the a ..read more

Introduction You might’ve noticed the increasing chatter around WebAssembly (WASM) in the dev community. Its potential is vast, and we’ve found it invaluable in enhancing our open source project! Hi everyone, I’m part of the team behind Permify, an open-source infra that helps developers to create and manage granular permissions throughout their applications. In this article, I’ll demonstrate why and how we integrated WebAssembly (WASM) into our Playground and gained benefits from its collaboration with Golang. What does this playground do? Well, without diving too deep, its a intera ..read more

Generated with DALL-E 3 Understanding the Fetch API can be challenging, particularly for those new to JavaScript’s unique approach to handling asynchronous operations. Among the many features of modern JavaScript, the Fetch API stands out for its ability to handle network requests elegantly. However, the syntax of chaining .then() methods can seem unusual at first glance. To fully grasp how the Fetch API works, it's vital to understand three core concepts: Synchronous vs asynchronous code Callback functions Promises Synchronous vs Asynchronous Code In programming, synchronous code ..read more

There’s a problem with those thousands of jobs available for Full Stack Engineers or Developers on LinkedIn, like a unicorn, that person isn’t real. Insert spit-take, read it, then tell me what you think. Photo by Paul Bill on Unsplash There I said it, you might think this is a controversial or unpopular opinion but if you hear me out maybe you’ll agree with me, maybe not, but that’s what makes life worth living. I’ve believed this for a long time now, but it’s time to put a little more thought and time to flesh it out. As for the term Developer or Engineer, yes technically they ..read more