Machine learning is not new, but advances in both hardware and software have recently opened the gate of possibilities. Automated drones and vehicles are capable of getting themselves from point A to point B without (much?) human intervention thanks to machine learning and artificial neural networks. With an extremely small amount of effort, software can now be developed to do incredible things with neural networks which couldn’t be done just a few years ago.
The RESTful API has a funny place in the software development world: it’s widely regarded as the best general-purpose pattern for building web application APIs, and yet it’s also nebulous enough of a concept to cause endless disagreements within teams over exactly how to implement one.
As is often the case, I found myself working on a personal project and had some UI elements that *really* wanted to have some life to them on the screen. I started sketching some ideas in code, and by the time I was done with it, had created a reusable framework to add fairly rich animation capabilities to programs written using the JUCE application framework, where I have been doing a lot of work these past few years.
At some custom software firms, it is their primary goal to make a sale–any sale–without concern for how the project will be accomplished. There are software salespeople who will promise the moon and stars in three months for a fixed cost of $10,000. In fairness to the developers at those firms, the salespeople do not involve them in the sales process, so they are usually the first to be surprised, long before the client is disappointed. Many software horror stories going back decades start in such ways.