Machine Learning: The Time is Now!

David Pitt Articles, Machine Learning, React, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Machine Learning enables a system to automatically learn and progress from experience without being explicitly programmed. It’s a subset of the artificial intelligence (AI) technology space being applied and used throughout your everyday life. Think Siri, Alexa, toll booth scanners, text transcription of voicemails – these types of tools are used by just about everyone.

Image recognition and computer vision are also widely being used in production; recently just heard that Los Angeles, CA has made it illegal for law enforcement to use face recognition technology in its numerous public video cameras. The current state of the art allows real-time identification.

Interestingly, the algorithms and know-how for Machine Learning have been around for a long time. Artificial Intelligence was coined and researched as far back as the late 1950s, the advent of the digital computer, and expert systems and neural networks, that theoretically mimics how our brain learns.

The increase in Machine Learning production-ready applications started around 2012, with increased processing, bandwidth, and internet throughput power. This is important as deep learning algorithms like Neural Networks require lots of data and FPUs/GPUs to train.

In this blog, we introduce a conceptual overview of Neural Networks with a simple Neural Net code example implementation using Go. We will interact with it by building a ReactJS interface and train the Neural Network to recognize hand-drawn images of the numbers 0-9. Let’s dive in….

AWS Amplify GraphQL Queries with TypeScript and Hooks

Mat Warger API Development, Articles, AWS, Cloud, GraphQL, JavaScript, React, Tutorial, TypeScript 1 Comment

I’m a big fan of Amplify. I’m also a big fan of TypeScript. Amplify is not built with TypeScript, and to use it effectively, sometimes you need to give it a little help, especially when it comes to GraphQL. With the advent of hooks, we can create some nice utilities for ourselves that let us leverage the power of TypeScript with our GraphQL queries. Let’s see what that looks like.

I’ll be assuming familiarity with React and TypeScript, i…

Originally posted by Mat Warger on mw.codes April 19, 2019.

Running Your Life With Emacs

Garrett Hopper Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming Leave a Comment

I program a lot, but I also do a lot of other things using a computer.

The problem is, I often want to use the same efficient key bindings I use while programming when I’m doing other tasks. I want to be writing an email or documentation and edit a code snippet in the same way I normally edit code. I want to manage Git repositories right from my editor without having to touch the mouse. I want to browse the web in my editor, so I can easily copy code examples and run them. I want to track my to-do lists and the amount of time spent on each task.

Imagine if there was a tool that could do all that and a ton more in an efficiently consistent way. That tool is Emacs…

The Jury is Still Out: Blockchain in Healthcare

Zach Gardner Articles, Blockchain, Healthcare, Hyperledger, Opinion 1 Comment

Blockchain has gotten the software world buzzing about its potential applications in different business areas. With the US spending 17.9% of its GDP on healthcare in 2017 per CMS, many companies are considering how to enter into a market that has such potential for growth as well as the potential to positively affect patient’s lives.

Keyhole Software stays ahead of the curve by investigating new trends in software so that when clients come to us asking for advice we can provide an informed opinion. We do not want our clients to be guinea pigs, and we help provide guidance so that the solution they choose is the best one regardless of the trends of the day.

Blockchain is something we feel could be a good fit for the right use case, which we’ve elaborated on in our Blockchain Case Study. It is, at the end of the day, just a tool, and should only be used when it is beneficial to do so. Healthcare is an incredibly complex industry, so it is important to understand what Blockchain is, what it is not, and what needs to be considered before using the technology.

The purpose of this blog post is to think through how Blockchain can be applied to healthcare software applications. This blog post does not dive into the technical implementation of Blockchain, only its application in healthcare. A technical deep dive into Blockchain can be found in our Blockchain White Paper.

AWS SNS Push Notifications

Matt McCandless Articles, AWS, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Java 1 Comment

Have you ever received endless notifications from the latest application you just downloaded? For example, a bank application that tells you your balance is less than $50. It is likely a message sent directly to your phone through Apple Push Notification Service, Firebase Cloud Messaging, or some other like service.

While you can use any of these services directly, there is a lot to gain by using something like AWS SNS to manage, send, and organize your notifications.

In this post, we show an example of the Push Notification feature of Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) using Firebase to handle the iOS and Android messages. Code examples are in Java using Eclipse.

Do note that this blog is solely focused on Push Notification feature of SNS. Keep in mind that SNS can be used for email and SMS messaging, but for brevity, we will steer clear of those.