Introduction Chat based interfaces, backed by powerful AI (Artificial Intelligence), are effective ways to connect with your customers. For decades thousands of brilliant and dedicated scientists have collaborated to create AI and Language Processing to construct automated systems for the betterment of humanity. More recently Microsoft wrapped this magic in tooling that makes it accessible to the less sophisticated masses (and .net developers) When blogging became popular a number of companies sought to ‘commoditize’ the complexity of setting up a server and running custom website software. Wordpress is the undisputed winner of ‘personal blog software’. What Wordpress has done for websites and content management Microsoft is doing for AI. The haven’t won yet, Amazon, IBM and others are all in this together. I’m working on an Amazon bot in parallel to this so that I can compare and contrast the services. ...

Many times I’ve had to sweep an inbox and do something with the email. Typically the easiest way is to use IMAP, but our corporate email server has IMAP disabled. Fortunately 2007 Microsoft Exchange has had a rich web service interface so I wanted to give that a try. One of the main patterns used is to read an email and then move it to something like an ‘archive’ or ’error’ directory. Exchange supports arbitrary message properties such as ‘category’ and even custom properties, so adding a category tag of “processed” seems like a good idea. I wanted to experiment a bit. ...

This post is for people who have started learning about hypermedia and feel that it over complicates the elegance of REST. When I started hearing about hypermedia I felt it was adding architecture acrobatics for the sake of buzzword enhancement. After having applied these techniques in a few places not only have a drunk the cool aid, I’ve setup a stand beside my desk. I look back and try to understand where my initial negative reaction came from. I realized that many of the examples were trivial and did not demonstrate the reality of what hypermedia brings to the table. ...

I’m using a hosted version of JIRA and needed to obtain quick totals based on filters that I have setup. I could not find any easy documentation online so I thought I’d share my quick hack. The REST API is very well documented and uses the same JQL as the filters do. In order to view the commit list for an iteration I have some JQL that looks like: fixversion = 20120611 and fixversion was 20120611 ON “2012/06/11” AND status NOT IN (canceled, “on hold”) ...

It’s a month past due so here is my obligatory “I changed my job” post. Over the last nearly 8 years at Comcast as part of the ‘Online’ group and later as founding member of mighty Comcast Interactive Media I’ve made many business connections, met a number of excellent peers and forged a few relationships that will last a lifetime. As a happily married 40+ dad with mortgage and college payments I often feel over the hill with regards to blogging and living out loud. As a Manager with a sometimes disproportional ego I also felt an obligation to ‘disappear’ for some time in order to give @tomjbarker room to make the team his own. I’ve no doubt that he will take what we started to the next level. ...