Saskia Freeke (twitter) is a Dutch artist, creative coder, interaction designer, visual designer, and educator working from Amsterdam. She has been creating an awesome digital art piece for every day since January 1st 2015. Her ever-growing collection includes some animated, visual masterpieces.
Just sitting there. Waiting to be opened, read. For months already.
The sender, you ask? Me. Paul van der Laken.
A nuisance that guy, I tell you. He keeps sending me reminders, of stuff to do, books to read. Books he’s sure a more productive me would enjoy.
Now, I could wipe my inbox. Be done with it. But I don’t wan’t to lose this digital to-do list… Perhaps I should put them here instead. So you can help me read them!
Each of the below links represents a formidable book on programming! (I hear) And there are free versions! Have a quick peek. A peek won’t hurt you:
Disclaimer: This page contains one or more links to Amazon. Any purchases made through those links provide us with a small commission that helps to host this blog.
Applied Predictive Modelling – by Max Kuhn & Kjell Johnson
The books listed above have a publicly accessible version linked. Some are legitimate. Other links are somewhat shady. If you feel like you learned something from reading one of the books (which you surely will), please buy a hardcopy version. Or an e-book. At the very least, reach out to the author and share what you appreciated in his/her work. It takes valuable time to write a book, and we should encourage and cherish those who take that time.
This specific link has been on my to-do list for so-long now that I’ve decided to just share it without any further ado.
The people behind GoalKicker, for whatever reason, decided to compile nearly 100 books on different programming languages based on among others StackOverflow entries. Their open access library contains books on languages from Latex to Linux, from Java to JavaScript, from SQL to MySQL, and from C, to C++, C#, and objective-C.
A while back I discovered this free game called Screeps: an RTS colony-simulation game specifically directed AI programmers. I was immediately intrigued by the concept, but it took me a while to find the time and courage to play. When I finally got to playing though, I lost myself in the game for several days on end.
Screeps means “scripting creeps.”
It’s an open-source sandbox MMO RTS game for programmers, wherein the core mechanic is programming your units’ AI. You control your colony by writing JavaScript which operate 24/7 in the single persistent real-time world filled by other players on par with you.
Basically, screeps is very little game. You start with in a randomly generated canyon of some 400 by 400 pixels, with nothing more than some basic resources and your base. Nothing fun will happen. Even better, nothing at all will happen. Unless you program it yourself.
As a player, it is your job to “script” your own creeps’ AI. And your buildings AI for that matter. You will need to write a program that makes your base spawn workers. And next those workers will need to be programmed to actually work. You need to direct them to go to the resources, explain them how to mine the resources, when to stop mining, and how to return the mined resources to your base. You will probably also want some soldiers and some other defenses, so those need to be spawned with their own special instructions as well.
Everything needs to be scripted well, as the game (and thus your screeps) runs on special servers, 24/7, so also when you are not playing yourself. Truly your personal, virtual, mini-AI colony.
The programming mostly occurs in JavaScript. This can be difficult for those like myself who do not know JavaScript, but even I managed to have some basic workers running up and down my screen in a matter of hours. Step by step, you will learn (be forced) to create different worker types (harvesters, builders, repairmen, and even some stupid soldiers) and even some basic colony management scripts (spawning workers, spending resources, upgrading stuff). In the mean time, you will silently learn some JavaScript while playing. As I put in more and more hours, I could even see how to improve on my earlier scripts. This makes screeps a fun and rewarding gaming and learning experience.
Do expect to run into frustrations though! If you’re no JavaScript expert you will personally create a lot of bugs. Of which the game by default send you messages, as your colony will get stuck overnight. Moreover, you will likely need to Google every single thing you want to do at the start. I found great help in this YouTube tutorial to get me started. Finally, you are only under nooby-protection for the first so-many hours, after which you will quickly get slaughtered by all the advanced multi-CPU players on the servers.
Heck, it was fun while it lasted : )
PS. I read here that, using WebAssembly, one could also compile code written in different languages and run it in Screeps: C/C++ or Rust code, as well as other supported languages.
2018 seemed to be the year of challengesgoing viral on the web. Most of them were plain stupid and/or dangerous. However, one viral challenge I did like: #100DaysOfCode
1. Code minimum an hour every day for the next 100 days.
2. Tweet your progress every day with the #100DaysOfCode hashtag.
3. Each day, reach out to at least two people on Twitter who are also doing the challenge
Many (aspiring) programming professionals competed in this challenge, sharing their learning journeys in domains from web development, machine learning, or data visualization.
With this blog, I wanted to share two of those learning journeys that stood out for me.
Machine learning
First, there’s Avik Jain’s 100 days of Machine Learning code repository on Github. Avik’s repository contains all learning activities he followed during the 53 days of programming he completed. Some of Avik’s entries really stood out, and I particularly liked his educational infographics:
Just look at the wonderful design and visual aids on this decision tree for dummies infographic, pseudocode and all:
Day 23: Decision trees for dummies. This just looks fabulous right?!
Although Avik didn’t seem to have completed the full 100 days, many others did.
Data visualization
I have blogged about Hannah Yan Han‘s 100 days of code project before, but she definately deserves another mention here. Her 100 days revolved around data science, data visualization, and storytelling using both R and Python. You can find her #100DaysOfCode Medium page here, and her associated Github repository here.
For example, one day Hannah explored where instant noodles come from, how they are served, and whether people like them or not.
What I found so great about Hannah’s project is that she picked a novel dataset every couple of days. Moreover, she used a extremely large variety of different visualization formats. All visuals were equally beautiful, but Hannah made sure to pick the right one for the purpose she was trying to serve. If you are interested in data visualization, you seriously should check out Hannah’s 100DaysOfCode Medium page.
The website PapersWithCode.com lists all scientific publications of which the codes are open-sourced on GitHub. Moreover, you can sort these papers by the stars they accumulated on Github over the past days.
The authors, @rbstojnic and @rosstaylor90, just made this in their spare time. Thank you, sirs!
Papers with Code allows you to quickly browse state-of-the-art research on GANs and the code behind them, for instance. Alternatively, you can browse for research and code on sentiment analysis or LSTMs.
paulvanderlaken.com 