Dan Barker

See the following -

12 Open Source Tools for Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing (NLP), the technology that powers all the chatbots, voice assistants, predictive text, and other speech/text applications that permeate our lives, has evolved significantly in the last few years. There are a wide variety of open source NLP tools out there, so I decided to survey the landscape to help you plan your next voice- or text-based application. For this review, I focused on tools that use languages I'm familiar with, even though I'm not familiar with all the tools. (I didn't find a great selection of tools in the languages I'm not familiar with anyway.) That said, I excluded tools in three languages I am familiar with, for various reasons.

Read More »

9 Resources for Data Science Projects

Data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep neural nets are all hot topics these days (and key terms that might help this post with some SEO, unless the AI sees through my attempts). Below I've shared several of the resources I use regularly while working on data science projects over the last few years. I don't read many books, so that I've shared even one is evidence of how important it is. There are enough resources here to get even the most novice engineer started on a path towards data science mastery in this new age where data science skills will be needed at every level. There is a tool for performing the work, a class taught by a renowned Stanford professor, websites with tutorials to give you real-life experience, and a site dedicated to making the latest research available to all for free so you can learn more if you want.

Read More »

Getting started as a GitLab contributor

GitLab's open culture is one of its strongest assets and the main reason I use GitLab in DevOps transformations. The community edition's code is open source and the paid version makes its source code available for contributions. These are valuable factors rooted in the company culture its CEO has diligently maintained over the years. It doesn't hurt that its tools are great, too. I believe GitLab's sales and marketing team is the best of any company out there. They have included me as a user, customer, and friend over the last few years, and they are genuine and caring people. This was underscored last year when I wanted to contribute a feature, and GitLab's team went to extraordinary lengths to help me succeed. Here's the story of making my first contribution to GitLab.

Read More »