Even at the cost of annoying folks around me, I’d dare say that 2020 has actually been a fabulous year for me, personally. I learnt quite a bit about myself, learnt a couple of new skills, learnt what I don’t like, what I don’t want to do, fixed a couple of things about my health and more. I’ll try to chronicle these for the rest of the post. I typically consider my date of birth as the beginning of another year....
So we had to transcribe a bunch of interviews we did earlier. One of the sessions was a good 45 minute long and had a tonne of details. It’s quite difficult to manually transcribe this. But hey, we gotta do this. And then we have to do a bunch more later. The wife was in charge of doing this and she was trying to do manually. Then she had a “eureka” moment and tried to use One Note’s speech-to-text function....
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....
I have been writing web applications for quite a while now. For a more significant part of this experience, I had been developing on top of an existing CMS type environment; moodle, drupal, WordPress, or the like. Very few of these are web applications written from scratch. I typically used PHP when I write for the web because it has the lowest barrier of entry. You can write HTML and then insert your PHP wherever you need dynamic content....
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....
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....
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 🙂...
We were discussing something yesterday and it came up for us to arrive at all the possible words with at least 3 letters using the letters in the word ‘football’. We started out with a paper and pencil and came up with about 2 dozens when it struck me that I could do this with python. The pseudo code in my mind was this: generate all permutations/combinations of the letters in the word...
Perhaps the best tool I ever learnt. I still remembering my boss mentioning this in a casual chat and encouraging us to learn Python. Sometime in 2005, I think. I learnt the basic usage in about a week. Python has been my language of choice since then. Its a little sad to think I have not quite mastered the language till date! I still have a long way to go before I can claim to be good in python....