Most of my blogging for the past few years has been published to Microsoft sites, and this is actually the third time I’ve spun up a personal blog.
Microsoft posts
Below are a few of my highlights from the Microsoft Learning, Machine Learning and Azure blogs. I have to give a big shout out to my collaborator and editor Shannon Wright for these as well. Her contributions were essential.
AI for Education: Individualized Code Feedback for Thousands of Students This post describes the code grader the team created in collaboration with Microsoft Research so that we could provide useful evaluations for thousands of student projects in our Introduction to C# course. My favorite part was when the light went on for me in regard to creating AI that understands the semantic meaning of a program rather than merely the syntax. It felt like the payoff for all my time spent studying Wittgenstein and Benjamin back in grad school.
Serious about cloud security? Check out this new training on Azure Security Center This one is a good representative example of how we communicated the real world usefulness of the training we made available. There is no topic where it’s more important to establish yourself as a trusted resource than security, and a key way to do that is to promise and deliver on walking people through examples of exactly how to use the tools in the real world.
Microsoft Cognitive Services: “The real magic is in the API.” –Scott J. Peterson This one covers our courses for getting hands on with Microsoft’s Cognitive Services so that you can, among other things, quickly create an app that can see and index the content of a video or photo or translate languages. The fact that computers can do these tasks does feel almost uncanny, but like Scott says, what’s really magical is that the power to use them is so accessible.
Get your team certified on cloud-critical identity and access management skills The second of a series of four posts focused on the value of Microsoft’s professional certifications from a business decision maker’s point of view, I like the way this one charts the course from identity as a problem to identity as a solution. Our intention was to provide a CEO with enough conversational knowledge to have a meaningful discussion with his IT team about their roadmap.
Personal blogs
My first blog. My first blog was on Typepad, because I had recently seen Anil Dash speak at a conference and I was blown away by his presentation. (To this day he continues to impress me, and I still pay close attention to his work.) There aren’t any posts that I’d call out as highlights, but I was happy to see it’s still live even though I haven’t touched it in years.
N – 1 blog. Like this blog, my second was a WordPress site. The posts there were timely, and several were written as part of ongoing conversations where I had more to say than could fit in email, but out of context and out of time, they don’t really bear up to reading today.
Super Fan Facebook Graph, is the exception. I took a course on mapping social networks just so I could get a picture of what my personal social graph looked like after spending a few years deeply embedded in the culture around the reality show Big Brother. The former contestants had huge numbers of connections to each other and to fans; likewise, the biggest fans also had massive numbers of friends and followers. The comparison to my organic groups of “people I play bridge with” and “people I went to school with” still boggles. I refer people to this post often.