Text-based communication has a long history weaved into the evolution of the Internet, from IRC and XMPP to Slack and Discord. And where there have been humans, there have also been chatbots: scriptable programs that respond to a user’s commands, like messages in a chat room.

Chatbots don't require much in terms of computational power or disk storage, as they rely heavily on APIs to send actions and receive responses. But as with any kind of software, scaling them to support millions of user’s requests across the world requires a fail-safe operational strategy. Salesforce offers a Live Agent support product with a chatbot integration that reacts to customer inquiries.

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Alex Hendricks turns up the radio in the cabin of his ‘91 Ford LT8501. He’s drowning out the noise of the construction crew 100ft ahead as they make progress on a brand new bridge in Waco, Texas. Alex isn’t here to take in the sight of fresh new infrastructure. He’s in his truck waiting for the go-ahead to deliver a payload of hot mastic asphalt to the bridge crew.

Alex has a ticket in his hands that needs a sign-off from the project’s contractor — a signature that proves he made his delivery, and on time. Without it, he doesn’t get paid, and the clock is ticking. Each ticket earns him about $60, and missing any of today’s three deliveries will start to make him sweat. His wife, at home...

A word of caution from a former AP Computer Science teacher who, with zero real-world programming experience, quit her dependable teaching gig to become a software engineer: Imposter Syndrome is never late to class.

When we grow competent in our craft, yet continue to feel unqualified for our role, that feeling is known as "Imposter Syndrome." The syndrome was with me before I started, it’s here with me now, and it will probably be with me for a long time to come.

If you’ve experienced it too, then reading that last sentence may leave you feeling pessimistic, grim even — as if we anticipate a future where we never feel completely worthy of our position in life. But to that, I...

In the early years of web development, there were three standard fundamentals upon which every website was built: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As time passed, web developers became more proficient in their construction of fancy UI/UX widgets for websites. With the need for newer ways of crafting a site coming in conflict with the relatively slow adoption of newer standards, more and more developers began to build their own libraries to abstract away some of the technical details. The web ceased being a standard: now your website could be a React site, or an Angular site, or a Vue site, or any number of other web framework that are not interoperable with each other.

Web components seek to...

Meditation, like the foundations of software, is built on top of a binary state: an inhale and an exhale, a breath in and a breath out, a one and a zero. We often believe that to engage in meditation, we need to place ourselves in a room of absolute silence, to dress in comfortable linens, and to be utterly still and alone. But this image could not be further from the truth! To meditate is to foster mindfulness, and presence is an activity that can be performed anywhere, and with others—even at work.

Learning how to be mindful amongst others

The Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute—or SIYLI—is a globally recognized nonprofit that works towards making the development of leadership...