What AI means for building new products

I’ve been very excited about AI for years, and have worked with Deep Learning, NLP, formal logic, and Bayesian Statistics methods for over a decade. However, one problem that we’ve had is “making AI useful”. We haven’t really had a new paradigm as such in computing for a while. I feel this is the top……

2022 in Review

Previously: 2020 2020 2018 2016 I realised that I hadn’t written one last year publicly. I think I have written some privately but I can’t find the document. I’m going to try to keep up this “year in review” thing publicly where I can. Firstly it goes without saying that this year has been a……

Tools as bicycles of the mind

At http://www.aflorithmic.ai we’re building infrastructure for creating audio experiences. Fundamentally, there’s a huge part of creativity involved there. And personally I believe the human creativity is almost limitless. Previously I spent a lot of my career building tooling and infrastructure for data scientists and researchers. So while I’m not a super expert on Api design,……

Delight your users

A friend said to me recently – ‘startups need to delight their users, and have an exceptional customer experience’. And that sounds like a trite, and repetitive sentence. But like a lot of cliches in life, it’s true. I was thinking recently about how many experiences I have with companies as a consumer or a……

Some recent reading

Photo by Marta Wave on Pexels.com This is s short blog post. And is merely some links I came across this week. https://www.fullstackpython.com/wsgi-servers.html – a great introduction to WSGI servers in python. I hadn’t seen this written up beforehttps://sudhir.io/understanding-connections-pools/ — Long read. This is a thorough and in-depth discussion of how connections and pools work.……

Lessons from 2020

Photo by Alex Smith on Pexels.com I have a small document where I try to weekly write goals and what I’ve achieved. Sometimes I don’t update it, but I reviewed my 2020 version and will try to take out some takeaways. Covid-19 was incredibly disruptive to our lives, but it accelerated ‘digital transformation’ in a……

Everything great starts small

Photo by Akil Mazumder on Pexels.com I’m an Entrepreneur, and a few years before I officially became one. One of my best friends said to me ‘I’ve always thought you were very entrepreneurial’. I think I shirked away from that. I’ve thought recently about why a I shirked away from that for a few years.……

Engineering Leadership: Lessons from Rugby

Photo by Patrick Case on Pexels.com I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Engineering Leadership. This is a very difficult job for all the reasons that leadership is difficult, management is difficult and that software development is a difficult discipline. For various reasons – we as a species suck at writing software. Writing great software……

Friday wins – celebrating shipping and delivery

Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com More meetings? At Aflorithmic we recently have been experimenting with Friday Wins. It’s important in a startup to enable the company to build things and talk to customers. This matters a lot to ‘building something people want’. However, I wanted to talk a bit about a meeting style that I’ve……

Why building ML systems is about more than ML?

I’m going to use a bit of a click bait title for this article. But the aim of this article is to share experiences I’ve gathered from about 10 years building ML systems, and building ML teams. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Why ML is about more than ML I saw the following tweets by……