Kevin Hoyt - Kevin Hoyt

Functions, Storage, Watson ... Oh, My!

I have a love-hate relationship with serverless. My style of development definitely trends towards dropping a function in the cloud and calling it done. But the tooling, integration, and best practices are still maturing. It is however, fun to watch the technology evolve. Recently Apache OpenWhisk (IBM Cloud Functions) released

IBM and the Open Organization

On October 28, 2018, IBM announced plans to acquire Red Hat. The CEO of Red Hat is Jim Whitehurst, and Mr. Whitehurst released a book titled "The Open Organization" in 2015. The book details a management philosophy Mr. Whitehurst acquired when he joined Red Hat in 2007. The book is

storage

Serverless Storage Redux

In my previous two posts I wrote about upload a file to IBM Cloud Functions (serverless), and then how to download a file from IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) using serverless. Both of these posts used the the provided IBM COS SDK for Node.js. In this post I will

serverless

Serverless Download from Object Storage

In the previous post, I walked through how to upload a file from an HTTP multipart client, to an IBM Cloud Function, and how to persist that file on IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS). In this post I will explore getting the file back out of COS and downloaded to

openwhisk

Serverless Upload to Object Storage

So there you are, building the world's next breakthrough social platform. And of course you want to minimize cost, administration, etc. so you use IBM Cloud Functions (Apache OpenWhisk). Then you decide to let users manage their profile picture. Uploading a file to a Cloud Function takes some consideration -

mac

What I Install

I have been a Mac user for some time, and really committed to the platform with the release of Mac OS X. With every major release I completely wipe my machine, and reinstall everything from scratch. Why not just upgrade in-place? Because I like the minty cool freshness of a

image

Transferable ImageData

In a previous post, I covered sending ImageData from a canvas element, to a Web Worker. This allows for threaded image processing without impacting rendering performance of the browser ... mostly. By Value There is still a performance hit, af around 20 milliseconds in my very informal testing. This has to

image

Image Processing in a Web Worker

WebRTC (Real-Time Communication) has many great uses, much of which is still relatively untapped. One of my favorite side effects of WebRTC arriving in browsers is the ability to put a live web camera feed into a video element. Once those two are paired, you can start performing real-time image

watson

Teaching Watson to See My Garage

After a long day of work, I like to head out to my garage and tinker, binge the latest series, listen to a podcast, or settle in with a book. If the weather is right, I will open the garage door. Eventually I will head to bed. Then it hits

events

Index Conference

It has been a number of years since I have been involved in running a conference. When a chance to chair a track around future technology at Index, I jumped at the opportunity. Beyond just my track however, here are some of the exciting sessions that I am looking to

ocr

OCR with Tesseract.JS

I recently ran across a DataTurks blog post that did a high-level comparison of the OCR (optical character recognition) APIs offered by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. At various points throughout the article, you are prompted to give them your email address in exchange for the test dataset; which I did.

watson

LightBlue Bean to IBM Cloud

The LightBlue Bean, by Punch Through, is one of my favorite IoT development platforms. The Bean has many parts, including an iOS application called the LightBlue Explorer, that lets you view and control nearby Beans. The gang over at Punch Through recently added the ability for the Explorer application to

blockchain

Event Notifications from Blockchain

As a ledger, among the core functionality of blockchain is to store data. Having that data encrypted, with an audit trail, distributed across all peers in the network, with consensus among nodes, is what really makes a blockchain solution compelling. A blockchain network is not always the only part in

developer

Developer Advocates and Content

Congratulations! Your first presentation as a Developer Advocate lay just ahead. You have put in the hours to build a really cool demonstration. It is a masterpiece of elegant code. Now comes the rest of the job. Being a developer advocate means a lot more than showing up with a

watson

Slap Robin with the ZX Gesture Sensor

Every now and again, I run across a sensor that just sounds like fun. Such is the case when I read about the ZX Gesture Sensor from Sparkfun and XYZ Interactive. Put it together with the Internet, and I just may have gotten a little slap-happy. The Sensor The ZX

swift

HTTP Requests from Server-Side Swift

As with any server environment, there are numerous (countless?) ways to make an HTTP request from a server-side Swift project. Most frameworks have their preferred approach. When it comes to Kitura, an approach that mirrors many of the requests libraries from other server environments, is KituraNet. Swift on the Server?

openwhisk

Async OpenWhisk Web Action with CORS

Apache OpenWhisk is a serverless (functions as a service) cloud platform, originated at IBM. It has broad language support, robust tooling, and fine-grained consumption (saves money). As a champion of the Web, here are a few patterns that I use repeatedly. OpenWhisk There is a growing community, and great documentation

developer

Developer Advocates and Ideas

Over the past decade, I have submitted abstracts to countless conferences, and been accepted at hundreds of events around a good portion of the planet. I do not say that out of ego, and in fact, I never even thought about the sheer number until I was recently asked "

watson

Watson Conversation System Entities

If you are building a chatbot, then Watson offers a product called Conversation. If you are wanting to get keywords from a body of text, Watson offers Natural Language Understanding. Sometimes however you are looking for something in-between. This is a post about that in-between. Natural Language Understanding The Watson

web

Preflight Image Hashing

Sometime earlier this year, I became enamored with image hashing. The idea is to read an image, perform various maths on the RGB color model, and output a unique string. Effectively, an image fingerprint. It turns out there are a lot of ways to do approach this task, usually trading

particle

Particle and Google Maps Integration

At Google IO 2017 just a few weeks ago, Particle announced an integration with Google Maps. This integration allowed you to get the location of a Photon without the need for a GPS. Instead location is achieved by referencing the wireless access points in the vicinity (a less scary way

machine

Face Detection with Tracking.JS

Tracking.JS is a JavaScript library that brings a few machine vision algorithms, and a splash of related utilities, to the browser. The web site has live examples with links to the source code for each, but I wanted to test it using my own images. Here is how I

web

Animated File Upload Button

Among the countless ways to perform a file upload from an web page, this will likely be nothing new. Progress bars are also nothing new. However, when I ran across a post from Osvaldas Valutis on customizing the appearance of the file input type, I thought it would be fun

watson

Content Keywords with Watson and Python

I am always impressed by Python when I have to use it. The community always has great content, and the surface coverage of the language is immense. This allows you to do a whole lot in a very few lines of code. While I generally have to use Python on

blockchain

Blockchain Vocabulary

Blockchain has gained a lot of attention this year. That is great! It is a fine solution for many problems. If you are a developer however, being asked to make since of what problems blockchain can solve for your business, then you may quickly find yourself in over your head.