Programming

I recently finished a course on Coursera. Machine Learning from Andrew Ng. Its been on my radar for the longest time and after several false starts, I finally completed mid last month. But along the way I learnt two things: I still relish math like I always did. I understood the concepts pretty well and am able to come up with correct solutions. I am somewhat terrible at coding them up. Now that’s a big surprise to me. I’ve been writing code for quite a long time now. After learning half a dozen programming languages and spending almost a decade writing code, it is a bit of a shock that I find it somewhat difficult to code up the algorithms. And especially in Octave/Matlab. I got thinking. I have built an entire application with all its shenanigans using python. I have been running it on AWS for at least 2 years now and I haven’t so much as contacted their support for anything other than increasing limits. And yet, here I am unable to code up a simple nested for loop to implement a linear regression model. I realised the problem to be, again, two-fold. ...

I am finally able to write common lisp code. Frankly, though, I don’t think I have arrived as far as Lisp goes. You can take a look at some of my work here: https://exercism.io/profiles/abishek Learning to write code, looking through CLHS for usage and figuring out a workable solution in a near-functional manner is how far I have gotten. I don’t yet know to write a macro. I mean, I know the construct to create a macro. But I am yet to arrive at a place where a macro would solve the problem in a more elegant manner. I am sure the mentors on the site are able to see multiple macros in my code, though. ...

For a while, I believed that jQuery and bootstrap are the best tools out there for getting a frontend working the way you want. I am sure there are jQuery pundits who still stand by this. But I am not a jQuery pundit. In fact, I am quite bad with javascript – for whatever reason, I never managed to master this one skill. I have been using javascript from 2005 but I still have to look up every now and then for some super basic operations. The same holds true for jQuery as well. But I still manage to write some apps here and there using jQuery and javascript. So basically, I can find my way without too much of a struggle. ...

I have fancied publish-subscribe middleware(pubsub) architectures for quite sometime. When we were still very new in CTS, I came up with a wild suggestion to try this for getting a data dump from a legacy system into our moodle instance. I was quite clueless about what this would entail in terms of development effort, but I could create a PoC setup within a few days which made me quite confident of being able to pull this off. ...

… is that you may end up having little to no understanding of domains where there are actual problems worth solving. For instance, Noni and I were discussing one of Noni’s ideas for payment processing. As software people, both of us can quickly locate the api and frameworks required and even build an MVP in little to no time. But neither of us are aware of what regulatory aspects control such finance apps. That means we now need to engage with a finance specialist (like an auditor or a chartered accountant or a banker). No, that’s not a bad idea as is. But it leaves us looking naive even though we pack close to 10 years of programming expertise each. ...

This one is long due – More than a week. A small note and the links I stumbled upon and was delighted to know. I’ll update every week, hopefully. Ever wanted to code during a presentation and get it right in front of all the audience? Here’s what you may need! Because sometimes you need to do it live This was fun knowing and hope to use it some day when I host a code hackathon or code demo 🙂 ...