Progress Update: May 24, 2016
I know I’ve recently posted about a few of my upcoming goals, but since then I’ve fiddled with a number of things since then and have some updates on my progress.
- Python Learning. Thanks to a suggestion on the Halihax Slack channel, I picked up a pretty decent IDE for my Python projects (PyCharm). Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that Windows is not the ideal platform for using Python. I wanted to work with a packaged called “sklearn” that I saw during a Google I/O session on machine learning, but it depends on SciPy; a package for scientific calculations. Unfortunately SciPy has some dependencies that do not install cleanly on Windows (LaPack and BLAS are a couple examples). I was really looking forward to toying with the code snippet from the presentation, and I’m sure there are plenty of equivalent libraries I could try out, but the fiddling process wore on me.
- Android Learning. I’ve been learning about making apps on the Android platform. There was a fair amount of setup and configuration for getting the IDE to work as well as setting up the right emulators to run code on. The annoyances were further compounded by the fact that I don’t want anything installed on my C drive. I use a smaller SSD drive for my C, and then put everything else on another drive; it allows my OS to run lightning fast and lets me get going faster. This guide ended up being really useful in moving the hefty emulators and other odds & ends to my storage drive: http://www.littlecpu.com/android-studio-c-drive.
I’m in a pretty good “hacking” state right now on this front after some effort. I’m learning about the UI-data model binding within Android page components as well as other architecture aspects. The architecture is fairly straightforward (activities, services, etc) but there seem to be a lot of conventions and gotchas.
- Java Experiments. I’m also back experimenting with Java as well. I’ve been using Derby (JavaDB) as an embedded database, and it’s pretty simple so far. I had toyed with MapDB a bit, but I’d like something a bit better supported so I can use Hibernate with it to avoid having to do my own schemas. I’ve also been using ElasticSearch in parallel. It’s kind of it’s own document-based database, but without the reliability – it’s usually used in conjunction with a real database and you just sync the data in batches so that Elastic can index the data to make it searchable. These components are all pretty straightforward, but I want to build a decent non-trivial demo project. I was also considering using Akka for the concurrency management to control the batch operations to ES.
Updates: May 2016
It’s been a while since I’ve posted about my recent endeavors outside of painting (this is by design). There’s been a fair amount of things keeping me busy and stressed. That being said, I’ve started putting together and working on my goals for the next several months. A large part of this will be getting my full-stack technical skills back up to a competitive level. I’m going to be focusing mostly on my Java skills as well as commonly-used libraries, since it’s been a while.
As part of this, I spent a bit of time building a small app to back up my development files. Mostly because I needed a good, automated process and didn’t want to go shopping for an app. I needed something that can backup different sets of files at different times, so I could selectively backup specific projects and images, but also my full dev repository. It seems to be working according to my tests, but I’ll be trying it out soon to find out.
I also plan on picking up Python. I think I will use Python 3, although I want to be knowledgeable of the differences from 2 to 3 as well so I can read/port existing code. It shouldn’t take long to pick it up, but I have to learn the specific syntax and rules such as scoping, etc. Some sort of project would help, so I’ll be trying to think of more home automation tasks I could fulfill with Python apps.
Lastly (for this post), I plan on giving my memory palace an upgrade. I need some more rooms, and I need to finish storing algorithms in it. I’m missing tree and graph algorithms (which are pretty important), and I wouldn’t mind adding some more details for implementation as well. This should ensure that I don’t have to review algorithms, data structures, and design patterns when I need to use them; I’ll have them permanently stored.
Abstract Pear Still life
Here’s a painting I did last night (considering giving it as a Mother’s Day gift). Acrylic paint on a 5×8″ Masonite board. I’m not sure how well it came out in the photo, but I used a spatter technique to get some texture on the background and pull some of that reddish colour onto the pear.
Jake Seigel's Schemes 