Month: January 2017

Five years of blogging and personal growth

Marky Roden Just Marky

So it’s been just over five years since my first blog post – I’d just been to an IBM conference and been inspired to do something about my career in a way I wasn’t expecting. To the day, it is five years since I registered xomino.com. My reasoning was to make myself more employable than I had ever been before. I wanted to get involved in the XPages community, express myself and see what happened……So a quick summary and time for self reflection. Five years ago I made the best decision of my professional career, and I had no idea what I was doing at the time 🙂

  • 388 published blog posts (including this one)
  • 380,000 page views
  • Got a job at PSC Group
  • Spoke 3 times at IBM’s global ICS conference
  • Spoke at InterConnect IBM’s global cloud conference
  • Spoke at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s global conference
  • Spoke remotely at a conference in Australia (that was weird but cool)
  • Spoke at a conference in the Netherlands
  • Spoke at a SharePoint conference
  • Spoke at multiple other events online and on stage
  • 3 times IBM ICS Champion
  • 1 time IBM Cloud Champion
  • 1 time Microsoft MVP

All in it’s worked out rather well actually. I’ve made some lifelong friends along the way, and got to work with some incredible people. It has been a blast and all because I stood up in front of several hundred people and made an ass of myself back in 2012….I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone 🙂

 

Azure Machine Learning Studio Office Add-In

Marky Roden Office Add-In, Predictive Analytics ,

I am currently in the process of learning more about Azure Machine Learning Studio . Within there you can create and train predictive models. As I am going through some of the examples I came across a great example of an Office Add-In.

I am creating a simple weather predicting example based on data I downloaded from an API service. More on that later. From my model I created a sample Web Service with the click of a button. This exposes an End point for me to send data to be “predicted on”.

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When you create a Web Service from your trained model you can access a test screen through the application.

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From there I spotted a link to an Excel App and I figure I would see what was going on there. Turns out it is an Office Add-In… !!

When the Excel sheet opened I was presented with the option to test the web service

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Once you load your test data into the sheet you can then use the Add-In to select the data to test – and designate where the answer will be added back to the sheet.

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And you push Predict !!!

Looking at the application using the F12 tool we can see the hosted Office Add-In location and also see the prediction in action.

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The web service is called and the response is a JSON string with all the answers and the scored confidence in the answer.

The Add-In then inserts those answers back into the Excel spreadsheet for you

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As you can see, my predicting needs some work but the Add-In and sample web service worked like a charm !!!

Poking around the site I can see it is built using Knockout.js and some jQuery – very cool 🙂

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Once I have properly figured out how this all Machine Learning lark works I am going to create some blog posts on the predictive side of this – but I wanted to share how cool this out of the box for free Add-In is

GREAT USE CASE !!

 

Predictive Analysis and Machine Learning

Marky Roden Predictive Analytics

Each year in January I pick a topic which is going to be my learning focus for the year. Partly because I started back in January 2012 (yeah 5 years !!) but also because it creates a basis of knowledge and information to speak on during the coming year. Previous years have been

  • 2012 – jQuery
  • 2013 – ExtJS
  • 2014 – Angular
  • 2015 – Bluemix
  • 2016 – MS Office Add-Ins

While Predictive Analysis and Machine Learning are not exactly “Emerging Technologies” their wide spread use is becoming so. With the significant uptick in IoT and data collection in general there is a growing feeling that this field will become mainstream this year. This is an area of personal and professional interest and I have been looking into it for a couple of months so far.

I have no significant aspirations to become a professional Data Scientist, but I do believe there is very meaningful ways predictive analytics can be integrated into our business solutions.

As normal my main goal of blogging is for personal reference and to build a knowledge base for myself (and others if they want to listen). I guess we will see how it goes 🙂

 

19 Jan – Speaking at Northwest Chicago JavaScript meetup – Office.js

Marky Roden Office Add-In , ,

We have been hosting the NWCJS meetup here at PSC Group for the past few months. We have had some great speakers talking about React Native, How Chrome works under the covers, ES6, Web Components and others. This time it is my turn to speak.

I am going to be talking about Office.js the framework library which is the underpinning of Office Add-Ins. I will be talking about how the framework works, how it’s intended to be used and present lots of examples of how you can use JavaScript alone to automate functionality within the Office suite of products (Word, Excel, Outlook etc). The Office.js library is intended to replace the main functionality of VBA but in a way that works not only on Windows machines, but also on the web and on Mac clients.

For more information on time and place check it out 🙂

Office.js

Thursday, Jan 19, 2017, 6:00 PM

PSC Group, LLC
1051 Perimeter Drive Suite 500 Schaumburg, IL

21 Javascripters Attending

Office.js – Using JavaScript to build functionality into Microsoft Office by Marky RodenMarky Roden is Principal Architect for the PSC Group LLC and Head of the PSC Labs emerging technologies group, tasked with using cutting edge technologies to transform solutions offerings for customers.**************Schedule 6:00 – begin arriving and sociali…

Check out this Meetup →