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Humans have great difficulty reading and transcribing shortened URLs that contain a random assortment of numbers and letters in upper and lower case. To give users URLs that are easy to type and transcribe, avoid switching keyboards and types of characters more than once, use a separator character to create subgroups, and eliminate ambiguous characters. Human-friendly URLs are ideal for printed materials and anywhere shortened URLs are needed.

Most web service are built on a microservices architecture with test-driven development. That makes sense for most large-scale, mature applications, but it may by counterproductive for rapidly evolving prototypes. Senior software engineer and science fiction writer Will Hertling explains why. 

Ah, the drama of pair programming! Arguing over what needs to be done. Fighting over how to do it. Bickering over coding style or test completeness. Will Hertling offers some do-it-yourself couple's counseling for paired programmers.

HP Developer and science fiction writer Will Hertling has been watching how new people on his team pick up software development -- specifically Ruby/Rails. He sees two markedly different approaches, which he calls Surface Learning and Deep Learning. Both have their place.

In early April 2019, Will Hertling, a 3D printing developer for HP Inc. and an accomplished science fiction author, delivered a message of technological disruption to the 71st annual Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colo. In nine panel discussions, Hertling spoke about the promise and perils of technological innovations in social networking and Artificial Intelligence.