I like to make my life easier by automating redundant tasks. At the job I left months ago, I had a role doing UAT and for some of the test cases, made life easier with some Python code that automated some keystrokes and mouse-clicks and got a notice when things didn’t work quite right.

At this new job with this software giant, this turns out to be encouraged.

Doing cybersecurity consulting work, it’s hard to determine what can be automated that a vendor hasn’t already figured out a sysadmin couldn’t do themselves with Powershell.

My mentor made an off-hand comment that RESTful APIs are changing programming for the better and mentioned that I should try to play around with one

As it turns out, I was studying Machine Learning and in the midst of tackling numpy, Jupiter notebooks, and learning the finer points of wrangling data, found that IBM had made Watson, their AI-enabled supercomputer available in an API. Looking through the documentation, IBM included access to a Visual Recognition resource. I applied for an API token, was approved and quickly wrote some 10 lines of Python to test out its functionality. Impressive. It gave its best guesses with different confidence intervals and correctly guessed the image I hyperlinked was a Red-Wing Black Bird