Image Placeholders: Do it right or don’t do it at all. Please.

Hello. I’m a grumpy old web dev. I’m still wasting valuable memory on things like the deprecated img element’s lowsrc attribute (bring it back!), the hacks needed to get a website looking acceptable in both Firefox 2.5 and IE5.5 and IE on Mac, and what “cards” and “decks” meant in WAP terminology.

Having this – possibly pointless – information to hand means I am constantly getting frustrated at supposed “breakthrough” approaches to web development and optimisation which seem to be adding complexity for the sake of it, sometimes apparently ignoring existing tech.

What’s more annoying is when a good approach to something is implemented so badly that it reflects poorly on the original concept. I’ve previously written about how abusing something clever like React results in an awful user experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love new tech, new approaches, new thinking, new opinions. I’m just sometimes grumpy about it because these new things don’t suit my personal preferences. Hence this article! Wahey!

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London Bot Framework Meetup the Third

Welcome to the Third London BotFramework Meetup! Here's the line up

On Wednesday 22nd November 2017 I had the pleasure of running the third London Bot Framework meetup at the lovely Just Eat office in central London. The offices have been recently upgraded and the new meetup space has a huge 9 screen display a multiple mic speaker system, including a fantastic CatchBox throwable mic for ensuring everyone hears the audience questions

It has been a year since the previous one (whoops) but it was great to see some familiar faces return in the attendees. I had forgotten how much fun it is to emcee an event like this! Maybe next time I’ll be sure to just emcee and not also commit presenting a session too.

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The Tesco Mobile Website and The Importance of Device Testing

A constant passion of mine is efficiency: not being wasteful, repeating something until the process has been refined to the most effective, efficient, economical, form of the activity that is realistically achievable.

I’m not saying I always get it right, just that it’s frustrating when I see this not being done. Especially so when the opposite seems to be true, as if people are actively trying to make things as bad as possible.

Which brings me on the the current Tesco mobile website, the subject of this article, and of my dislike of the misuse of a particular form of web technology: client side rendering.

What follows is a mixture of web perf analysis and my own opinions and preferences. And you know what they say about opinions…

Client Side Rendering; What is it good for?

client side rendering frameworks

No, it’s not “absolutely nothing”! Angular, React, Vue; they all have their uses. They do a job, and in the most part they do it well.

The problem comes when developers treat every problem like something that can be solved with client side rendering.

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Building your first Botframework based Cortana Skill

Hi. I'm Cortana.

At //BUILD 2017 Microsoft announced support for Cortana Skills and connecting a Cortana Skill into a Bot Framework chatbot; given the number of chatbots out there using Microsoft Bot Framework, this is an extremely exciting move.

In this article I’ll show you how to create your first Cortana Skill from a Bot Framework chatbot and make it talk!

Cortana

If you’re not already familiar with Cortana, this is Microsoft’s “personal assistant” and is available on Windows 10 (version 1607 and above) and a couple of Windows phones (Lumia 950/950 XL), a standalone speaker – like an Amazon Echo – and a plethora of devices that can run the Cortana app, including iOS and Android and plenty of laptops.

Cortana all the things, Derrick.

You’re going to be seeing a lot more of this little box of tricks (“Bot” of tricks? Box of bots?.. hmm…), so you might as well get in on the act right now!

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Involved in a startup? Read this!

Having been the VP of Engineering at a startup, I understand a lot of the challenges. The technical ones relating to the solution you think you need to build, more technical ones relating to the solutions the investors want you to build, the development process to best fit a rapidly changing product, team, requirements, and priorities, as well as managing the team through uncertain terrain.

They’re the fun ones. The easy ones! Especially given how talented my dev team was.

The founder had the difficult challenges; define a product that could be a success, iterate that idea based on extensive user testing, and most importantly, ensure there was funding.

Luckily, our founder was as talented at soliciting funds as we were at building epic tech!

If you are involved in a startup, perhaps Just Eat’s Accelerator programme can help with both types of challenge!

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Receiving Images to Your Skype Botframework Bot (v2!)

If you’re getting a “403” HTTP error when attempting to receive an image sent to your Skype bot, and the previous use of message.ServiceUrl to create a ConnectorClient didn’t work, try this more verbose version which explicitly sets the authorization header:

byte[] data;

if (image.ContentUrl != null)
{
    using (var connectorClient 
        = new ConnectorClient(new Uri(message.ServiceUrl)))
    {
        var token = 
            await (connectorClient.Credentials as MicrosoftAppCredentials)
                .GetTokenAsync();

        var uri = new Uri(image.ContentUrl);

        using (var httpClient = new HttpClient())
        {
            if (uri.Host.EndsWith("skype.com") 
                && uri.Scheme == Uri.UriSchemeHttps)
            {
                httpClient
                    .DefaultRequestHeaders
                    .Authorization = 
                        new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Bearer", token);

                httpClient
                    .DefaultRequestHeaders
                    .Accept
                    .Add(new MediaTypeWithQualityHeaderValue("application/octet-stream"));
            }

            // Get the image in a byte[] variable
            data = await httpClient.GetByteArrayAsync(uri);
        }
    }
}

Generating Image Hashtags using Microsoft’s Computer Vision API

Whatever your social media tool of choice is these days, it’s almost guaranteed to be filled with images and their associated hashtags #sorrynotsorry #lovelife #sunnyday

Sometimes coming up with those tags is more work than perfectly framing your latest #flatlay shot.

In the age of amazing image recognition tech, it must be possible to create something that can help us out and give us more time to move that light source around to cast the right shadow over your meal.

Turns out, it is possible! Yay! (of course..)

In this article I’ll show you how to automatically generate image hashtags via a chatbot using Microsoft’s Computer Vision API.

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Sentiment Analysis using Microsoft’s Cognitive Services

Now that we are making more conversational interfaces thanks to technology like botframework, interaction with the user is no longer limited to a tap on a link or a button.

Having written language as the primary form of interaction with our systems gives significant difficulties in terms of intent understanding, but also gives great opportunities for further understanding of the user.

Intent understanding has already been tackled by the likes of LUIS; what about the user’s sentiment?

In this article I’m going to introduce Microsoft’s Text Analysis API and show you how to easily get sentiment analysis for a message coming in to your bot.

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MVP led TechDays Online: Videos!

As part of Microsoft’s recent Tech Days Online, I was very pleased to be able to record a couple of short videos about botframework, LUIS, the QnA Maker, and how I have been working with JustEat to use these technologies in their Customer Help chatbot solution.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the live TechDays sessions, so instead of an hour or two of my dulcet tones you only have the pleasure of ten minutes; feel free to replay those minutes as many times as you like!

First up, a ten minute session on the JustEat Customer Care chatbot implementation:

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5 Cool Chatbots: Feb 2017 Edition

ChristopherBot (Facebook)

Never forget your homework again

I have to include this bot first; it’s received a lot of press over the past few weeks, and rightly so. A great little concept from a 14 year old schoolboy who was forever forgetting about his homework. He created a Facebook messenger chatbot in Ruby and hosted on Heroku to help him (and you!) keep track of work that’s pending.

ChristopherBot

Read more about ChristopherBot on the BBC and try it out over at christopherbot.co. You can view the code (mainly Ruby) over on GitHub – annoyingly good code from someone so young! He puts me to shame..

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