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.
Jake Seigel's Schemes 