Another area in which I wanted to improve my understanding was system design, as I kept flubbing interviews on that topic. I considered jumping straight into Alex Xu's System Design Interview (vol. 1 or 2) but was convinced to instead tackle a classic text, Martin Kleppman's Designing Data-Intensive Applications. Published …
Articles tagged with RC
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who engineers a browser?
After my attempt to write a digital breadboard, I turned back to job hunting for a while. But that quickly paled and I looked around for a project that would keep my fingers typing and my commits flowing. I stumbled across a group of folks at RC working their way …
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rc-niceties
A frequent comment about the Recurse Center is "everyone here is so nice!" Perhaps due to careful admissions, or the social rules, RC participants strive to keep it a supportive community where people are open to others: working together, communicating carefully, and respecting each other. One mechanism for building the …
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Cost of Drinking
When I started at the Recurse Center, I had several vague ideas of projects I wanted to work on. A throwaway comment on the price of beer in Budapest inspired me to see if beer could be used as a cost of living metric. The first maps I found polled …
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PageRanking RC Zulip
Over the past couple of weeks, I and some colleagues in the Mastering Large Datasets with Python group have been practicing our new ability to scrape and process large amount of data with Spark, by harvesting public messages from the RC Zulip and analyzing them. (For those unfamiliar with Zulip …
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Puzzling Goings-On
Today, an RC colleague organized a group to tackle a git mystery, in which murder has been done and the clues are hidden in commit messages. My group did not solve the crime within the hour, nor did we limit ourselves to git commands. But we appreciated the spirit of …
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Three Things Learned
I haven't been keeping up with this blog, but I have been keeping busy. A few things I've learned recently:
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Although JavaScript has a
typeofcommand, it doesn't produce very useful output. In particular, it yieldsobjectno matter whether the structure in question is a Map, an Array, a …
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refactoring checklist; ML project ideas
In a recent conversation I mentioned that when I meet a new Python feature, I add it to my refactoring checklist. Someone asked me to share that checklist, and here it is, slightly expanded:
- write all comments/docstrings
- resolve all TODOs
- add types to all fn declarations and key local …
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RC Week 1
My first week at the Recurse Center has been a bit of a firehose, mostly socially. It wasn't until Friday that I found myself with more than an hour of unbroken coding time, between orientation activities, chats/pairing with fellow RCers, presentations and craft evening and feelings check-in and more …
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RC Day 1!
I've set a goal to reflect on each day at the Recurse Center; not all those reflections will be public, but those related to what I'm working on will be. The day started a bit earlier than I've been used to, and I enjoyed the orientation activities for the most …
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sorting and planning
This week, I've been gearing up for my batch at the Recurse Center, prompted by a flurry of facilitator emails. I've joined Zulip and indicated my interest in a reading/project group for Mastering Large Datasets with Python; posted my introduction to the Welcome thread and read about who else …
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Recurse Center, incoming!
I'm honored and excited to join the January 2021 batch of the Recurse Center, a unique community of programmers focused on self-directed learning. Although their Brooklyn space is closed for the foreseeable future, they've put an impressive amount of effort into facilitating productivity and communication with Virtual RC, leaning heavily …