Tony is a Geek

As much as I've been in denial....yes, I can now admit I have a problem... ..and that problem is that I've un-expectedly been moving into senior-management. I don't know how it happened, one-day I was happily skipping along, enjoying myself, gorging on all the new technology, new projects, new clients, new colleagues, life was awesome, it was great...and then slowly but surely as the projects started to change, the people started to change, the tasks I was 'expected' to do changed, there was more emphasis on planning, resourcing, organising, 'getting the right people' and it became less about myself being hands-on, physically making solutions to the problems....and then one day last week I was sitting at a meal with the latest project team and a work colleague turned and said to me, "So, how do I become a senior manager like you?". That stumped me.  I'm not a senior manager, am I?  I'm still (mentally at least) young and driven t

oh no, not another buzzword / Javascript framework for me to be aware of?!? nope.  well, maybe, possibly, actually no.  It's the "new tool" on the block. Okay, so you managed to get through your IT career (from 2000->) by using SOAP, you all recall the lovely XML that was being passed around, hugely complex, nightmare to navigate and get right, schemas always changing, people doing custom stuff and then having the immensely lovely job of parsing all that bloated XML, even if all you wanted was 1 field value. Then REST APIs came along and we all rejoiced, JSON will destroy XML and life will be good.  REST allowed us to use GET, POST, DELETE and we could make endpoints that made sense.  Life was good. As with all things new, the old ways soon caught up. Then we started to pass back via REST lots and lots of data and the UI layer would then have to extract out the actual data it needed.  There was no harm in sending back 10 fields that we currently didn't use

Fancy running some Quantum stuff on a Raspberry Pi? Well, now you can....sort of, well, you can run a simulation, it's not going to be a proper Quantum computer is it?, it's a Raspberry Pi. Check out this original article here to find out more . Check out this video to see how you can use QRasp: https://github.com/ordmoj/qrasp

“There are an estimated 3 billion smartphones in the world, and 7 billion connected devices," Googlers Alex Ingerman and Krzys Ostrowski  waxed lyrically . "These phones and devices are constantly generating new data ... Wouldn’t it be better if we could run the data analysis and machine learning right on the devices where that data is generated, and still be able to aggregate together what’s been learned?” https://www.tensorflow.org/federated/ TensorFlow Federated (TFF) is an open-source framework for machine learning and other computations on decentralized data. TFF has been developed to facilitate open research and experimentation with  Federated Learning (FL) , an approach to machine learning where a shared global model is trained across many participating clients that keep their training data locally. For example, FL has been used to train  prediction models for mobile keyboards  without uploading sensitive typing data to servers. TFF enables developers to simula