Twenty Years of Machine Learning at Microsoft

Machine Learning is the new kid on the block.

This is of special interest to me since I specialized in that field 15 years ago to "unspecialized" three years later after being discouraged by the lack of real market of the discipline. Back then (early 2000's) ML applications were always academically inspired with little true business value delivered....

The limits of DocumentDB Preview Release

I was looking for the limits of DocumentDB Standard Tier, the only tier available during the preview release.  It wasn’t all too trivial to find so here it is:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/documentdb-limits/

Among the limits that may constrain your solution:

• Only 3 collections per Capacity Unit (but 100 Databases, the container of collections, per account)
...

Surveying the Web API Security Landscape

Ronnie Mitra published a nice review of the current security protocols & standards available to you to protect your API.

Ronnie gives a good overview of what used to be available, in SOAP WS-*, what is currently available (HTTPS, OAuth and the like) and what is brewing for the future (Oz & Macaroons).

Gamification / Habit-Forming Products

I found this very informative introduction article on how addiction works in products such as Facebook or Candycrush on Wired.

I've been exposed to the concepts in the recent years thanks to a friend of mine who became an expert on gamification. It turns out that the mechanics used to get you hooks on different video...

To GIT or not To GIT

GIT, the one that vanquish them all. Gee… I can't get my head around that product!

I spent an entire 5 months project using it and I still don't get it. True, I used it with the proverbial 10 feet pole, with the minimal subset of features and with no integration into Visual Studio (thanks to a weird Network...