AI & Automation

AI tools, Claude Code, automation, and AI-assisted workflows

  • Slowly Delving into AI

    This year seems to be a big year for AI development. Deep Learning approaches are going to be applied to more areas and I expect most of the big name tech companies will continue to expand their research in the area. The encouraging thing for the rest of us developers is going to be the…

  • Learning AI Algorithms

    One of my goals for the year is to get deeper into learning the new generation of AI algorithms and practice getting good at applying those to real problems. AI has been one of those areas that always fascinated me, and then I took the AI course at university and learned that it just wasn’t…

  • How to Maintain Momentum

    The main lesson from a handful of recent books that I have read has been focus on fewer, more important things if you really want to make progress.  Less but better.  And that the best way to maintain the momentum on the projects you do want to take on is to make small steps and…

  • Taking a Machine Learning Course

    I started a Stanford course yesterday on Machine Learning.  It’ll be interesting to update my knowledge since things have changed a great deal in that area since I did an AI class at Waterloo 10 years ago. Machine Learning has really taken off in the last couple years as the number of problems and the…

  • Strength Training Required

    These last few weeks have been stressful.  Trying to hit deadlines at work and hunched over a computer again at home have left me more sore than I can ever remember being.  My back is shot, and I haven’t been able to sleep comfortably for at least a week.  It’s been brutal.  Once you get past…

  • Learning about Artificial Intelligence

    There has been a real break through in AI technology over the past year with the work that Google is doing on the Google Brain project. Details are scarce at the moment but it seems like they’ve taken neural network concepts and dramatically improved their performance.  From what I can glean, Google is using this internally,…

  • Painted Living Room

    Sometimes all that’s needed is a little bit of paint. Last weekend Heather and I started painting our living room in an effort to make the space more liveable. By painting over the brown and beige walls with white the furniture becomes more of a focus and the room feels brighter and bigger. With a…

  • Ben Franklin’s Daily Schedule

    Came across this today. The thing that struck me is Ben and I go to sleep at the same time, but he got up 2 hours earlier in the morning than I do. Two hour lunch breaks — good idea. Time to plan and time to reflect each day. I’m going to try to work…

  • Python Imap Gmail

    Connecting to a Google Gmail account is easy with Python using the built in imaplib library. It’s possible to download, read, mark and delete messages in your gmail account by scripting it. Here’s a very simple script that prints out the latest email received: #!/usr/bin/env python import imaplib M=imaplib.IMAP4_SSL(‘imap.gmail.com’, 993) M.login(‘myemailaddress@gmail.com’,’password’) status, count = M.select(‘Inbox’)…