Last year, I took Object Oriented Programming (CS371p). As part of the class, I had to write weekly blog posts that summarized my class-related accomplishments from the past week, as well as what I still needed to get done. My favorite part of each of the posts was a required section called “Pick-of-the-week”, where you chose something in the realm of Computer Science and Software Engineering that interests you, and write about it. Here are some of the things that I wrote about.
A movie called “Midnight in Paris”, starring Owen Wilson. Main takeaway from the movie: what we want in life is right in front of us. Second takeaway: I want to go to Paris.
I recently picked up a bullet-journal, and I’ve been using it to organize my to-dos, my schedule, my classes, and keep up with my New Year’s Resolutions. Hopefully I’ll stick it out for at least a year. So far it’s been fun and productive hobby.
not sure why this bit isn’t CS related :)
My pick-of-the-week is an awesome Google 20% project: Trump2Cash. Here is the corresponding Medium article: This Machine Turns Trump Tweets into Planned Parenthood Donations.
It’s a stock market bot that buys and sells stocks based on public companies mentioned in Trump tweets. The idea behind Google 20% time is that Google developers get to spend 20% of their time working on side projects. I think the policy is no longer being continued, but it’s a really interesting practice to get developers to create new potential products, and increase their creativity!
When I was in high school, I competed in an Artificial Intelligence competition called Halite (Halite competition). This past week, because I’m taking an AI class here at UT, I checked it out again. It was really really fun when I competed in the 2016 competition, even though I didn’t do so good. The idea of writing a bot to “compete” against other bots is really cool!
My pick of the week is this really cool article about Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat:
The Friendship That Made Google Huge
Jeff Dean gave a really cool talk about the future of AI here at UT last semester, and I found this article after looking him up. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat were two of the original google employees, and together they helped to create groundbreaking software and systems within Google, including MapReduce, TensorFlow, and Spanner. Within Google, they were famous for what they accomplished as a pair (they pair programmed).
Why I Don’t Use Autocomplete. The author compared autocomplete to Google Instant Search, a feature that is useful in some cases, but often distracting from the goal of converting your thoughts into text. This made a lot of sense to me, so I disabled Google Instant Search. I also don’t use autocomplete, but that’s mainly because I use vim and I’m too lazy to set it up.
I found a collection of articles written by Edsger Dijkstra, a Computer Scientist who was a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin before passing away. I found this article particularly interesting. It describes the growth of the Computer Science/Software Development field over the last half-century, and how Dijkstra helped to define the discipline of programming.
Two interesting podcasts given by Lex Fridman. The first was an interview with Bjorne Stroustrup, the creator of C++. The second was an interview with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python.
A really cool algorithm visualizer tool that a friend made back in high school. It might be helpful if you have an algo test this week!
Open AI’s GPT-3. The article has some videos of the AI generating html code from descriptions of a web page in natural language. I thought it was super cool. As I understand it, the GPT-3 AI is a neural network built off of the internet’s data.