Author Archives: alankent
Is Machine Learning Good for Small E-Commerce Business?
Machine learning, a part of the broader field of artificial intelligence, uses computers to spot patterns from data. Larger companies like Amazon, Google, Walmart, and eBay use machine learning in multiple areas of their businesses to great effect. But what about small businesses? Can they use machine learning as well? What is Machine Learning Good […]
Faking a Composer Repo
This is just a quick tip. How can you have a project behave like a Composer repository, but where the packages are in subdirectories of a git repository. First, if the package is the only package in the git repository and the composer.json file for the package is in the root directory, composer can reference […]
Why My Microsoft Surface Pro is not an iPad
I got a Microsoft Surface Pro as my new laptop replacement. Why did I go with a Surface? It was light (the same weight as my 12.9” iPad Pro so is good for traveling), has good specs (I have the 16GB RAM model which can drive a high a good resolution monitor), and it can […]
Windows PowerShell, Control-Z, and Kitematic
I quite like Kitematic for Docker. Its marked as “legacy” so it may go away one day, but until then it provides a nice GUI to spin up containers, launch a web browser pointing to your container, and so on. (I use it on Windows.) But there has been one thing bugging me. When I […]
Installing GraphIQL for use with GraphQL in PHP
I was playing with GraphQL (an alternative to REST) recently using a PHP library and was trying to get GraphIQL (note the extra “I”), a web based “IDE” for writing GraphQL queries. This blog post is to save anyone else who stumbles across this post some of the wasted pain I went through. TL;DR: Don’t […]
Amazon Echo 2?
Last November there were rumors of an Amazon Echo 2 coming with a 7 inch touch screen. I’m not sure I want one. I want one with a 20 inch screen instead! Wall mounted. Is 20 inches too big? For me I want to load up my family photos as well – so its a […]
A Personal Experience of Amazon Fresh
I was curious about the real life experience Amazon Fresh and the Amazon Dash wand, so I signed up for the 30 day free trial. This post shares my personal first impressions after my first day of use. (This post is not an “expert’s view after deep experience and analysis.) As background, Amazon Fresh is […]
