Mike Taylor

AI agents need the right context at the right time to do a good job. Too much input increases cost and harms accuracy, while too little causes instability and hallucinations. Context Engineering with DSPy introduces a practical, evaluation-driven way to design AI systems that remain reliable, predictable, and easy to maintain as they grow. AI engineer and educator Mike Taylor explains DSPy in a clear, approachable style, showing how its modular structure, portable programs, and built-in optimizers help teams move beyond guesswork. Through real examples and step-by-step guidance, you'll learn how DSPy's signatures, modules, datasets, and metrics work together to solve context engineering problems that evolve as models change and workloads scale. This book supports AI engineers, data scientists, machine learning practitioners, and software developers building AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, and multistep reasoning workflows that hold up in production. Understand the core ideas behind context engineering and why they matter Structure LLM pipelines with DSPy's maintainable, reusable components Apply evaluation-driven optimizers like GEPA and MIPROv2 for measurable improvements Create reproducible RAG and agentic workflows with clear metrics Develop AI systems that stay robust across providers, model updates, and real-world constraints

Use Marketing Strategies to Captivate and Persuade Your Audience At first glance, marketing and L&D may seem like an unlikely combination. But on closer inspection, both fields share two core goals: getting people’s attention and influencing their behavior. Marketing involves captivating, persuading, and creating value—all of which are key to learning design. When done well, learning design grabs participants’ attention like a great marketing campaign and engages them emotionally and intellectually to make learning stick. In this innovative volume, marketing and L&D experts Bianca Baumann and Mike Taylor ask: How can L&D pros make learning programs more effective by thinking like expert marketers? To answer that question, Baumann and Taylor explore the potential of marketing-inspired L&D. You’ll discover: What makes marketing so persuasive and how to apply it to learningHow to craft magnetic learner personas and journeys to pull people inTactics for writing and designing content to capture attentionDigital tools and automation strategies to multiply your effectivenessWays to measure and optimize for maximum results Whether you’re new to learning design or a seasoned pro, this practical guide will transform how you create and deliver training. Get ready to boost engagement, improve retention, and deliver learning experiences that truly resonate.

Large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion have unprecedented potential. Because they have been trained on all the public text and images on the internet, they can make useful contributions to a wide variety of tasks. And with the barrier to entry greatly reduced today, practically any developer can harness LLMs and diffusion models to tackle problems previously unsuitable for automation. With this book, you'll gain a solid foundation in generative AI, including how to apply these models in practice. When first integrating LLMs and diffusion models into their workflows, most developers struggle to coax reliable enough results from them to use in automated systems. Authors James Phoenix and Mike Taylor show you how a set of principles called prompt engineering can enable you to work effectively with AI. Learn how to empower AI to work for you. This book explains: The structure of the interaction chain of your program's AI model and the fine-grained steps in between How AI model requests arise from transforming the application problem into a document completion problem in the model training domain The influence of LLM and diffusion model architecture-and how to best interact with it How these principles apply in practice in the domains of natural language processing, text and image generation, and code

Learn how to craft elegant and well-structured software frameworks in a variety of JavaScript environments with this handy guide Key Features Explore the gateway to the constantly evolving world of JavaScript frameworks Navigate the JavaScript development landscape and discover crucial software architecture patterns Build your own framework for a variety of work-related projects Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook Book DescriptionJavaScript frameworks play an essential role in web application development; however, no single framework works perfectly for all projects. This book will help you understand existing projects, design new software architecture, and maintain projects as they grow. You’ll go through software architecture principles with JavaScript, along with a guided example of structuring your project and maintenance guidance. This book covers framework planning aspects, enabling you to identify key stakeholders, understand JavaScript API design, and leverage complex abstraction. The second part of the book takes a practical programming approach to building your own framework by showing you how to structure modules and interfaces. As you advance, you’ll discover how to develop data-binding components, work with JavaScript APIs, and much more. While writing a framework is half the job, continuing to develop it requires effort from everyone involved. The concluding chapters help to achieve this by teaching you the crucial aspects of software maintenance and highlighting the constants of framework development. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a clear understanding of the JavaScript framework landscape, along with the ability to build frameworks for your use cases. What you will learn Expand your knowledge of JavaScript frameworks within different runtimes and ecosystems Get to grips with the technical aspects of structuring framework abstractions in JavaScript Gain an understanding of common patterns across various existing frameworks Discover the usage of existing tooling such as TypeScript and GraphQL Configure performance tests for your project and track down bottlenecks in the code base Understand how JavaScript and the web evolve and what these systems will look like in the coming years Who this book is forIf you’re a JavaScript novice or an expert who wants to explore the world of JavaScript frameworks, this book is for you. This book introduces you to the history of frontend frameworks and guides you through the creation of your own framework. The chapters are designed to help developers build large projects for their full-time jobs and programmers who want to create open-source projects. A clear understanding of the JavaScript programming language as well as experience with existing software frameworks are all prerequisites.

Proactive Flying is written for pilots who are just beginning their careers in aviation and encourages the development of the skills and qualities that will equip them to become effective crew members, and one day lead a crew of their own as a Captain. This book blends an emphasis on technical proficiency and skills with those essential for leadership and effective communication as the key ingredients for operational safety and effectiveness. In addition to the knowledge, skill, and ability necessary for success in aviation, Captain Taylor adds an emphasis on personal qualities such as attitude, motivation, and self-awareness as essential elements of what is required to be known as a professional. Proactive Flying is written as a guidebook for young and aspiring aviators, and is offered from the perspective of a Captain who wishes to share "the things he wish someone had told him when he was just starting out."

Life, Love, God--we have all known the joy, pain, and anger that come with all three of these aspects of our journey. Moments Within My Soul is a peaceful collection of writings that reminds us to never give up on Life, Love, God, or ourselves--there is always hope. About the AuthorMike Taylor lives a simple life. He works a 40-hour-a-week job, enjoys time with family and friends, and enjoys going to Church on Sundays. Mike became a Christian early in life, but through life's heartache and pain he started living his life his way, still knowing God was there but not living his life God's way but his own. He lived this way for many years, thinking he had a good life, but when this life came crashing down he found himself lost and alone on a journey that was leading to nowhere (at least he thought), then God stepped in and these writings began and he led Mike back home.

One blessed day, author Kimberly Floyd receives an email from a close friend that contains an unusual request; her friend's brother, Mike Taylor, wants permission to email Kim after viewing her Web site. While at first Kim thinks of her email correspondence with Mike as merely a fun and friendly diversion, their relationship soon blossoms into a promising online romance. However, after Kim learns more about Mike and his past, she struggles to reconcile her strong faith with her feelings for the man she has grown to love. Adapted from the authors' real-life email correspondence during their courtship (think of the romance movie "You've Got Mail"), their story is sure to inspire Christian singles as well as married couples that when it comes to relationships, God's plan is always the best plan. And yes, this is the same Kimberly and Mike Taylor of the Take Back Your Temple Christian weight loss program and website.

THE ELEVENTH DOCTOR contains reviews, discussions and digressions on all 43 of Matt Smith's episodes. It also features series retrospectives, evaluations of the different Doctors, and a look forward to the next Doctor. Along the way, it talks about Steven Moffat's writing, Matt Smith's acting, the glory that is Rory, and the visual vocabularies of various episodes. It also contradicts itself repeatedly, makes wildly inaccurate guesses about how series arcs are going to pan out, and gets sidetracked onto ubiquitous surveillance, Peter Jackson's Tolkien films, and how to make a perfect summer salad. If you're not already a Doctor Who fan, this book will not convert you -- in fact, it may not even be comprehensible. If you're looking for facts and stats about the show, you won't find them here. But if you love Doctor Who and want to dig deeper into what makes it tick (and what sometimes stops it from ticking as well as it ought to), then THE ELEVENTH DOCTOR is for you.

This book completes Mike Taylor's three-volume coverage of craft on the Humber's inland waterways. Volume one dealt with tugs and towing barges and volume two with tanker barges. This final instalment concentrates on the story of the dry cargo barges that plied the Humber waterways from the early days in the seventeenth century, through their flourishing heyday, to their gradual decline due to the proliferation of roads and railways. From time immemorial barges have afforded a means of moving dry cargoes from place to place on rivers and estuaries, carrying many times the weight of goods that were transported by cart or packhorse. A thriving trading network was in place on the Humber waterways well before the start of the twentieth century and continued to prosper despite the construction of roads and the coming of railways. Although the use of waterways transport did eventually start to subside, some still exists today. In this detailed history, a wealth of illustrations describe the development of dry cargo carrying on the Humber waterway from the days of unpowered craft through to the self-propelled vessels and push-towed craft of later times, covering keels, sloops, pull-towed vessels and motorised dumb barges.

The introduction of iron tanks within barges in the early twentieth century enabled much heavier cargoes to be carried on the Humber waterways, including liquids such as coal tar or vegetable oils and, by the 1920s, petrol. By the late 1950s/early 1960s, tanker traffic flourished on the industrial waterways like the Aire & Calder and Sheffield & South Yorkshire Navigations. Mike Taylor relates the story of the Humber tankers, widely illustrated and interspersed with recollections of men who worked on the waterways. This detailed book provides a overview of the history of these craft on the Humber waterways, including looking at boatyards, cargoes, waterway features and the interconversions of dry cargo craft to tankers.

Bring Bees to Your Flowers, Orchard and Vegetable Patch.

Features the tugs and towing barges that have moved cargoes on the Humber's inland waterways from early in the twentieth century to contemporary times.

Over the years, several books featuring shipping on the River Humber have been published, but few have viewed their subject from an inland waterway viewpoint. This book, together with its companion volume Shipping on the Humber - The South Bank, attempts to fill that gap, though sea-going traffic has not been ignored. Wooden sailing keels and sloops, characteristic of the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the steel motor barges that came along later, are featured in the illustrations, together with the shipyards where many of them were built and maintained. Maps and photographs of inland waterway craft at work on the docks, havens, rivers and canals of the Humber's north bank have been selected from locations including Driffield, Beverley, Brough, Hessle, Hedon, Newport and, of course, Hull.

The River Humber has been used for commercial navigation for centuries and remains today as one of the busiest stretches of waterway in Britain. Several books on the Humber concentrate on Hull, almost to the exclusion of the South Bank of the river. This collection of images, dating from the late nineteenth century to the present day, is arranged topographically: travelling from Louth and Cleethorpes upriver to the Ouse/Trent confluence. Over 150 illustrations feature keels, sloops, lighters and motor barges, all of which have been present in steadily declining numbers over the past five decades, together with the Lincolnshire boatyards where many of them were built and maintained. Other small craft are also included, such as dredgers, cross-rover ferries, pilot boats, tugs and some sea-going craft, as well as images of the docks and waterways themselves. Maps and photographs of several locations have been selected to feature aspects of the Ancholme Navigation and Louth Navigation, as well as the waterside areas of Grimsby, Immingham, New Holland, Barrow Haven, Barton Waterside, Brigg, Ferriby Sluice, Winteringham Haven, and inevitably, Hull, with which they all have had cross-Humber links.

The River Calder rises in the Pennines north of Todmorden and flows to Sowerby Bridge and Salterhebble, where it receives the Hebble Brook. The river then flows through Elland, Brighouse, Mirfield and Dewsbury before reaching the Aire Calder Navigation at Wakefield. The river was made navigable in the 1770s and soon after, with the construction of the Rochdale, Huddersfield and Huddersfield Narrow canals, became part of the Mersey-Humber trade routes. Trade was brisk for many years but by the 1940s the canal was in decline; the Halifax branch was closed and surrounding canals abandoned. However, commecial traffic on the navigation soldiered on till 1981, when shipments to Thornhill Power Station ceased. Illustrated within the pages of the Calder Hebble Navigation are over 200 images of canal boats (both horse-drawn and motor-powered), items of canal furniture and activity on the navigation's many wharfs.

The Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation linked industrial South Yorkshire, including Sheffield, Rotherham and Doncaster, with the ports of Hull and Goole. It played a major part in the export of coal from the many collieries in the region and the import of grain, timber, steel and more general cargo. From the improvements around Sheffield at the end of the nineteenth century, through neglect during the First World War, public ownership and the expensive modernisation scheme of the 1980s, as well as the triumphs and failures of private enterprise, The Sheffield & South Yorkshire Navigation documents the history and development of the waterway. Included in this volume in a diverse collection of over 200 images of the navigation, its traffic, and of the surrounding area, depicting the historical and present influences of the traditional industries of the area, from the South Yorkshire coalfields to steelmaking and glass blowing.

A history of River Trent navigation

This is a photographic history of the Yorkshire Ouse navigation, with a wide-ranging collection of images from the early days to today showing the changes over the years.