Category: Software-Technology

Indie Program Management Software-Technology

Mastering JIRA for Agile Projects: A Practical Guide with Real-World Examples (Confluence Included)

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Jira is becoming a leading tool for project management at larger businesses, and using it is a skill required for many jobs. This book teaches you how to master Jira processes to manage projects under Agile or Scrum paradigms. Half of this book focuses on Confluence software, which my workplace does not use. Therefore, half of the book was irrelevant to me. However, the Jira sections gave me a formal training that I lacked. It…

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Artificial Intelligence

A Simple Guide to Retrieval Augmented Generation

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a process in artificial intelligence (AI) where specific documents can be consulted to provide an answer. It provides a way for individual groups to customize a bot for their internal uses. For example, a company can provide business policies specific to their own organization. Or healthcare firms can provide literature up to date with their own fields, not just the latest AI build of the foundation model. Frankly, this topic confused…

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Artificial Intelligence Indie

The Complete Guide to Microsoft Agent Framework: Build, Test & Manage AI Agents that Integrate Seamlessly with Azure, M365 & Business APIs

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

This book seeks to teach readers how to write Python or .NET code to perform certain tasks as Agents within Microsoft’s AI platform. Unfortunately, it’s heavy on code and light on concepts. I wish it’d teach more about how to integrate with Azure’s web interface instead of the command line alone. It does succeed at showing many examples of how to code agents, but it lacks a deep conceptual explanation of how agents integrate with…

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Artificial Intelligence Indie

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) & Vector Databases: A Practical Guide for AI Developers

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is how artificial intelligence prioritizes facts in a given domain over and above all the information the basic, foundational model offers. It allows businesses, scientists, and others to prioritize their custom knowledge instead of making up answers. It’s an extremely powerful tool that most AI users don’t understand. This book tries to explain the basics of a RAG system in Python code. Unfortunately, despite a grasp on the basics of RAG, it…

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Artificial Intelligence

Prompt Engineering for Generative AI: Future-Proof Inputs for Reliable AI Outputs

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Prompt engineering is the art and science of finding the right words to generate the right responses from artificial intelligence (AI). It’s becoming a skill in-demand in today’s workplaces. It’s also becoming an essential skill for life. To understand prompt engineering, you must understand how AI tools understand their inputs. This book explains that to you in many forms. It covers prompting as it intersects all the major AI disciplines, like general prompts (as in…

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Indie Program Management Software-Technology

The Technical Program Manager Guide: Navigating the Path to Success

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Traditional program management consists of guiding a suite of programs for business success. As IT has recently become ascendant in the marketplace, that paradigm has applied to software in a role called the technical program manager. Leading tech companies, like Meta, Apple, and Amazon, have made ample use of this position in their business strategy. The problem is that there is no set career progression into this role. Arpit Agrawal tries to demystify this role…

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Artificial Intelligence Software-Technology

Developing Apps with GPT-4 and ChatGPT: Build Intelligent Chatbots, Content Generators & More

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Everyone today seems to want to do something with artificial intelligence (AI), but few seem to know how to do it well. We’ve started to see how AI bots can induce horrors, and business leaders plead to avoid those risks. ChatGPT, packaged from OpenAI, remains the dominant, most trusted AI tool even though many other versions exist. It’d be nice if we software folks could stop and get a masters degree in AI, but life…

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Artificial Intelligence Science

AI for Scientific Discovery: Proceedings of a Workshop by the National Academies

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine guide America’s federal research policies based on identifying challenges in the field. This 2024 workshop looked at opportunities within scientific research for artificial intelligence (AI) to contribute. It was led by national experts discussing use cases in their research and attempted to generalize based on those experiences. Most use cases were from American-based science, but AI in Africa was a recurring theme. Overall, the abundance of unique…

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Artificial Intelligence Software-Technology

AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

It’s always daunting to pick up a technical book that’s over 500 pages long or 21 hours long. However, this book did not disappoint. Not every section, of course, addressed my particular needs. However, the entire treatise was clearly communicated with a broader technical audience in mind. That should be no surprise because Chip Huyen, besides being an AI expert, taught graduate school classes in AI at Stanford and writes science fiction as a side…

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Software-Technology

Pair Programming Illuminated

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Pair programming is a practice in software development whereby two programmers write code together. I’ve studied it from afar until recently. What happened is a colleague asked me to pair program with him. As his program manager from a coding background, we’ve been working with relative success and happiness for several months. I liked the process so much that I wanted to take a deep dive to explore problem areas and tricks of the trade…

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