Adding More Cats to Your Tech

Tech can be overly serious at times, and lacking in cats! Luckily there are a lot of different opportunities to bring more cats into your engineering ecosystem. Everything from error codes to neural networks can be enhanced with a few choice cat pictures.

It's a truly serious problem. How many cat memes have been implemented into your code lately? Have you replicated Google's 2012 seminal work on neural networks and unsupervised learning to identify and find cat videos?

Luckily, there's a solution for that! The internet is chock full of ways to catify your tech skills, or simply give you the ability to catify them yourself. 90% of the internet is cat related anyway.

Take for instance, https://github.com/aleju/cat-generator. This website is a riff on Google's work, generating cat images with neural networks. This skill is obviously something that everybody needs to know. After all, if you cannot generate cat images using a highly sophisticated deep learning technique, you're clearly falling behind in the technical world. Plus you can learn the super popular language Lua, and work with some Facebook open source! And obviously, if you don't know Lua, can you really claim to know tech at all?

Then there's https://github.com/flores/moarcats, which generates cat gifs on demand. You get a cat gif, you get a cat gif, EVERYBODY gets a cat gif. It's relatively simple to contribute to this project and get a feeling of accomplishment. Submit a cat!

If you'd rather just leverage this cat gif tool, there's a front end website you can simply embed in your website. Sure, it's a .net, but not all technology is perfect (remember zip disks?).

There's also of course the infamous https://http.cat. No website is complete without appropriate error notation and recognition of your HTTP codes. And pretty much everybody who knows ANYTHING about tech, leverages the codes of http.cat. It truly marks you as a first rate technologist.

Http.cat is also a great learning opportunity to remember and learn the lesser known HTTP codes, like 422, 509, and 200.

These are just projects that I've discussed with other technologists in the past 24 hours. You can do whatever you want implementing cats! Someone in my friend's company wrote a script to auto add Evil Black Metal Cats to their pull requests.

It's so popular there's even a company CALLED Cat Technology, that develops IT Infrastructure solutions for other companies. No, I'm not entirely positive, but I think the CEO of this company is in fact run by business cat. He's been out of a job since leaving Miaoco.

If you haven't been working on integrating cats into you tech, you're falling behind the learning curve. You can do whatever you want, in whatever language you want -- but the job is to spread and promote the usage of cats on the internet. It's a great learning experience, and a must for a burgeoning (or established) technologian.

Happy Catting everybody!