Until recently, I really envied Ukrainians because they have a pretty solid Python community. There are tons of conferences — off the top of my head, I remember Kiyv.py, KharkivPy, PyConUA, and I’m sure the Python scene was buzzing at less formal meetups too. In Moscow, nothing like that existed, even though quite a few Python developers attended Yandex.Saturday, YaC, DevConf, and other events. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
The Machine Learning course from Coursera has ended. Well, it ended for me — assignments can still be submitted until August first.
I liked the course. I originally signed up because I wanted to use machine learning in a couple of my projects. Now I have a better understanding of what can be done with machine learning and what kind of results to expect.
Another impression that first arose from a university artificial intelligence course, and which repeated itself now — I’m surprised at how simple and understandable the ideas behind these algorithms are, backed by mathematical foundations. Take gradient descent, for example — that’s covered in the first year of university!
@Yuki_Sumaguro and I are working on a non-commercial project to create a small website. Generally speaking, my markup / layout skills are in a rather rudimentary state, since I haven’t had to do much layout work. And when I did, I produced something rather mockup-like.
But now the task is to make a website, preferably from scratch. Accordingly, I’ll have to come up with a design, do the layout, whip up something in JS, and code the server part, albeit a simple one.
I was just finishing up Jeff Atwood’s article and was about to sit down to watch lectures on HCI when the lights flickered and the internet went out. I was planning to write here today anyway, but I wanted to do it closer to evening.
Today let’s talk about work tools. As it happens, a programmer’s main tool is a text editor. Sure, there are IDEs of varying degrees of sophistication that provide lots of different functionality, can work with plugins, and allow you to change the environment beyond recognition through extensions. But the most powerful IDEs still remain, at their core, text editors wrapped with additional functionality.
One of the main things I’ll remember this spring for is taking a whole bunch of online courses from Stanford University, mostly available on Coursera. By the way, Coursera itself is apparently built entirely on open-source tech and recently got $16 million in funding.
Back in the fall, I signed up for a ton of courses, most of which were supposed to start in February:
The start of the courses got delayed, but by mid-March, two of them had launched: Natural Language Processing and Design and Analysis of Algorithms I.
I’ve finally gotten around to starting my own blog. I’d been meaning to do this for quite a while, but there was always some reason to postpone it — mostly the standard set (laziness, work, urgent matters). Now my work schedule has become somewhat calmer, and I’ve more or less dealt with urgent non-work matters. Besides, I got tired of constantly moving the “Start a blog” task in my planner :)