Last week, I revised one of Unified.to’s earliest articles, An Overview of Unified APIs, rewriting it as What is a Unified API?
In addition to updating the text of the article, I also created some explainer graphics to liven it up and save the reader from being hit with just a wall of text. Those graphics are what you see in this article — enjoy!
If you were to time travel and visit Crazy Go Nuts University during my student days, you’d find that the thing I was known for wasn’t programming or playing the accordion, but drawing comics.
The web came around at the very end of my long and colorful academic career, so my comics mostly appeared in student newspapers — primarily Golden Words, a satire newspaper in the same vein as the original print version of The Onion, as well as the main student newspaper, The Queen’s Journal.
I make the occasional comic every now and again these days, and when Dan Arias, a former coworker at Auth0, found out about it, he asked me to draw some comics as a way to “storyboard” some screens for an app for the 2023 Oktane conference.
The comics were supposed to showcase some features of Auth0’s customer identity management system, and if possible, do so in a humorous way. They also had to use some animal mascots that had been created for the project: a platypus, a rabbit, a capybara, and a boar.
I recently found the sketchbook with the comics I made for the app. They never went into the app — they were just storyboards for the app’s artist, Sofía Prósper Díaz-Mor, to use as guides, and the final versions that appeared in the app looked fantastic.
Still, there’s a rough charm to my doodles, so I thought I’d post them here. Perhaps it’s time for me to make more posts as comics…
The app had a space theme, so all the comics featured our animal characters — once again, a platypus, a rabbit, a capybara, and a boar — as characters having science fiction adventures that also featured some aspect of digital identity.
This comic was about fine-grained authorization, which is a fancy way of saying “very specific control over who’s allowed to do what in a system”…
This comic was the storyboard for a story about anomaly detection, which attempts to detect logins that have a suspicious quality to them. I did this by having an alien disguise themself as the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Platypus, and board the ship…
“The planet of a thousand apps” was the setting for this comic about single sign-on. The idea was every activity on the planet was controlled by its own app, which meant that you either had to log into a different app to do anything, or you could use single sign-on…
To illustrate the security advantages of passkeys, I came up with this comic. It shows that with a passkey, you don’t have to memorize a password, and even if a hacker manages to break into the server, all it has is the passkey’s public key, which (as its name implies) is known to everyone…
“Make Star Wars without getting us into legal trouble,” they said, and this is the resulting comic. It features our rabbit character as “Bun Solo” and our capybara as “Capybacca.” In this rough sketch comic, they destroy the centralized identity database, the Data Star, freeing the citizens of the galaxy to use decentralized identities. In the second page, I show the uses for them…
Watch this space — I think it’s time to do more comic-style blog posts here on Global Nerdy!
Here’s the “official unofficial” list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for Monday, May 13 through Sunday, May 19, 2024.
How do I put this list together? It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.
In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.
What goes into this list? I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:
I’m being asked by a growing number of people this one question: “I want to get started learning and building AI apps with Python. Should I go with the Python.org distribution, Anaconda, or something else?”
For anyone who wants to learn Python and AI development, my answer is invariably:
Why?
Once again — if you’re learning Python for AI development:
ℹ️ Disclaimer: This is NOT a paid promo for Anaconda. I met some of their people at PyCon, but the company has no idea who I am or that I’m doing this, and they certainly don’t know how to put money in my bank account. I’m just a satisfied user who uses it for my own projects and for teaching Python and AI programming.
It’s funny because it’s true.
Mine isn’t even on this graphic! It was PRINT from good ol’ all-caps Microsoft BASIC with line numbers, which used to come built-in to what used to be called “home computers.”
If you’ve tried to go past the APIs like the ones OpenAI offers and learn how they work “under the hood” by trying to build your own neural network, you might find yourself hitting a wall when the material opens with equations like this:
How can you learn how neural networks — or more accurately, artificial neural networks — do what they do without a degree in math, computer science, or engineering?
There are a couple of ways:
Along the way, both I (in this blog) and Tariq (in his book) will trick you into learning a little science, a little math, and a little Python programming. In the end, you’ll understand the diagram above!
One more thing: if you prefer your learning via video…