Tim O'brien

AWS DeepRacer is a cloud-based 3D racing simulator, an autonomous 1/18th scale race car driven by reinforcement learning, and a global racing league. Reinforcement learning (RL), an advanced machine learning (ML)...

Each September, PRSA celebrates Ethics Month, featuring programs presented by the PRSA Board of Ethics and Professional Standards (BEPS). This year’s theme is “Doing the Right Thing.” Please join the discussion...

I remember setting our first camera traps in August 1998 for what would become an 8-year tiger-monitoring program in the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park in southern Sumatra. Ullas Karanth, a Wildlife Conservation...

Each September, PRSA celebrates Ethics Month, featuring programs presented by the PRSA Board of Ethics and Professional Standards (BEPS). This year’s theme is “Ethics Every Day.” Please join the discussion via...

A few months ago, I read something from a PR professional that revealed a certain amount of confusion over the matter of investor relations (IR) and ethics. More to the point, it occurred to me that the confusion could...

If you’ve ever migrated a team from one build tool to another, you’ll understand that this process is full of peril.  Changing build tools, or for that matter, anything involved in the development process...

On the one hand you have XCode.  XCode is still very much the most integrated IDE for mobile development. It takes a while to master the tool, the language, and various external frameworks like AFNetworking....

This Target hack is a BFD. I’m at the mall this weekend because I’m a very last-minute shopper and it was the only time I could find to shop. My wife calls me because she gets this email from Chase which I’ll...

The problem with being the developer who can write at an open source company is that you end up being enlisted into the whole “Please explain how open source works” discussion when the company hires non-technical...

In my post on Friday I wrote a fictional piece from 2020 predicting that the world’s IT infrastructure shifted to in-country data centers after the recent surveillance revelations.   It looks like this is going to...

Two weeks ago I blogged about Lift as a good site to help people meet personal goals.   Now, Lift has announced a new feature “Plans”. What I like about Lift is it’s simplicity.  It isn’t asking me to tweet...

Two days ago I wrote a post about how “developers tailing the logs” is a common pattern.  A couple people responded to me directly asking me if I had some sort of telepathic ability because they were stuck in a war...

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to help a large company upgrade a fairly critical piece of software that was running everything.  I can tell you that the job involved Tomcat, but that’s about it. As a consultant,...

You have a server-side bias and you don’t even realize it.  I know this, and you need to know this.  It’s keeping you back a bit. Step one is to admit that you have a problem and that your addiction to easy...

I work with people much younger that I, but the reality I’m discussing in this article is really just 12 years ago. It feels like another era entirely. This is especially true if you develop anything that touches the...

At the risk of sounding like a raving lunatic, I decided to come up with a space-inspired taxonomy for characterizing OSS projects.  I came up with this after kicking around GitHub over the weekend trying to make sense...

My summary of general Java sentiment after attending JavaOne 2013. “Everyone’s all excited that Java didn’t die. Yay! We made it!” Ok, that’s not fair, how about: “Everyone’s excited that Java has new...

Was eating at a local restaurant a month ago. (A good one, but I won’t mention which one so that the owner won’t get in trouble with OpenTable.) We sat at the bar because I had a hard time getting a reservation, and...

We cut an simple EC2 image with Nexus OSS 2.0.1 running on Ubuntu 2.0.1. If you are thinking about adopting a repository manager, Nexus OSS is often the first step in this journey. While most of our audience downloads...

GitHub offers integration with a billion zillion services, and they just present them all in one big list.  Here’s the problem. Who knows what all these services do?  Notifo, Pushalot, Grove, DeployHQ, Depending,...

Ok, “Big Data” is going the way of “Information Superhighway” and “Web 2.0”.  How do I know?  I know this because I’ve seen a number of posts by people both attacking and defending it as a “thing”...