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Showing posts from July, 2020

Conversational design tools and resources

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There are a ton of tools out there, everyone has their "go to" tools and the occasional new one pops up when you talk to someone else, but here's a website that collects them all together, categorises them and let's you see the new one's that come on the scene. Nifty reference site:  https://cui.tools/ CUI Tools is a directory of the best conversational design tools and resources to help you master your next voice or text-based bot project. Made by Olivier Heitz .

Will AI kill off coders? I doubt it

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Thoughtful article: https://towardsdatascience.com/will-gpt-3-kill-coding-630e4518c04d I guess these people were not around when the whole "4GL is going to take over the world" commotion was going on in the late 90s & fading out in the early 2000's. What's a 4GL? a 4th generation language. It was meant to be procedural and "program-generating" software.   It was meant to be so simple that if someone could use M$oft Excel, they could build an application without the need for those pesky expensive programmers. Whilst this was okay for outputting boilerplate / templated code that created generic and bland / functional applications they did feel a little bit "soul less'.  That's an interesting choice of words I use there.  How can code or an app have a "soul".  Well, it can't, it will have the representation of the artists (programmers) personality expressing what the end user would like to use.  Some people like to drive boring ca

7 questions to ask yourself before committing to anything

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I should subtitle this as: "learning to say no".  I'll explain. I was put into an interesting position earlier this week, I was asked to commit to doing a piece of work for the next 5 weeks, starting in 2 days time.  This task would most likely take up a good 20-30 hours of my working week. " That's not a problem ", I hear you say, " I'm sure you could juggle things around to make that fit ". Well, that was the other problem, it's also a nice problem to have, being asked to help out on more things, but there comes a time when you have reached maximum capacity and you need to identify that, otherwise what you'll end up delivering for other people is going to be of lower quality than what you want it to be.  Sure, for some people this might be okay, do a lot more things, drop the quality a bit, it's no problem, someone else will pick up the slack,etc...etc... That doesn't work for me.  If I commit, I'm all in.  C