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I’ve given a number of talks, and over the years I’ve made the journey from completely unprepared to mostly knowing what I’m doing. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve settled into a routine that works for me. This has been the advice I’ve given to a number of folks who are looking to start speaking, or improve their existing technique. I’ll break it down into three posts: Pre-work Writing (this one) Presenting Writing Everyone’s process differs for how they craft a talk....

I’ve given a number of talks, and over the years I’ve made the journey from completely unprepared to mostly knowing what I’m doing. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve settled into a routine that works for me. This has been the advice I’ve given to a number of folks who are looking to start speaking, or improve their existing technique. Empty Auditorium, Flickr image CC-BY-2.0 I’ll break it down into three posts:...

A couple of weeks ago, Jessica Rose posed this question to the tech crowd: What piece of advice do you wish you had been given when you entered the industry? — Jessica Rose (@jesslynnrose) August 7, 2017 It’s a great question. Previously, I had different answers depending what age range I was addressing – one for middle school students, and another one entirely for college students. While the answers I’ve given have changed throughout my career, I think I can consolidate all the different versions into this one:...

Getting a computer to see and understand stuff is hard. Way hard. Like, hard for a long time. For a bit of context, slide 15 seems to be the definitive abbreviated history, dating all the way back to 1966. If you want to dig into the details, there’s a free Udacity course on computer vision offered by Georgia Tech. However, you can add computer vision and intelligence capabilities to your applications without the deep understanding of machine learning by using Google Cloud Vision....

In the last few entries on creating a containerized Minecraft server, we created the container, launched the server, moved data to a volume, created regular backups of our world, took a look at customizing the server’s properties, and updated changes to the container. Right now, our setup is pretty solid! So, let’s get to that fun and impractical thing I mentioned that we’d be doing with Kubernetes. Lego® representation of a Minecraft mooshroom in a mushroom biome...

Last time, I said that in the next entry in this series I would do something fun (and likely impractical) with kubernetes. I lied; sorry. Since then, I received several great questions that I didn’t manage to cover, so I thought that I’d address a couple of them now. This entry will be rather piecemeal, but hopefully much shorter than the prior ones! Customizing the server.properties file The start of accidental PVP harm...

This is Part II in a series on running a Minecraft server in a container on Google Cloud Platform. If you missed Part I, make sure to glance over it for context. Last time Last time, you took an existing application (a modded Minecraft server) and containerized it, using the Debian base image. You used a Google Cloud Platform container-optimized image to build our image and run the resulting container on Google Compute Engine (GCE)....

I only started playing Minecraft a couple of years ago, and rage quit after I set my house on fire due to a misunderstanding of lava dynamics. It reentered my life when I saw an article on qCraft, a mod that incorporates elements of quantum physics into gameplay. From there, I discovered the amazing world of Minecraft mods, accompanied by YouTube videos and collections on imgur showing off creations. Dramatic Lego® reenactment of the lava incident...

Last week at [APIStrat Chicago](www.apistrategyconference.com/2014Chicago/ APIStrat Chicago), I gave a new and improved version of my Hierarchy of Developer Needs keynote that I initially debuted at [Glue Conference](http://gluecon.com Glue Conference) in May. That first version of the talk and blog entry addressed primarily how to go about identifying your developer and constructing your hierarchy. However, in this version, I dove into what can go wrong with your hierarchy, and how you can go about correcting problems that might arise....

What happened? Last Monday in Seattle I ran logistics for a monthly meetup. I secured the speaker, arranged the room, and secured us food. I wanted to make it an awesome event because I’ve enjoyed working with the technology in question and have even given a few talks on the subject. We had a lot of interest from the Seattle community, the speaker gave a fantastic presentation, and answered a bunch of great questions at the end....