Learning Journal | Nearsoft Academy | Week 3
October 12th — October 19th
Hello! 👋 This is my third-week takeaways being part of the Nearsoft Academy program, a space to learn, practice, and grow. I’ll post every week, all about the topics I’ve learned during this adventure.
I’m a visual and kinesthetic person, so you will see a lot of sketch notes here, I hope you enjoy them, and also, feel free to share if they were useful for you.
Well, this is what I captured this week:
Week Readings
This week I had different readings to read, most of them were about testing, you can see my notes in the next sketch, but basically, it exists different testing frameworks that can make your coding process easier.
You can read Martin Fowler articles here:
TDD — Xunit — UnitTest — Mocks aren’t Stubs
Then, missing the semester has different articles and tutorials about different tools for dev, and this week I read about Git and Vim
Version control systems are tools that we can use to track changes in collections of files and folders, usually, source code. If you want to know who wrote something into a file or when that happened, you can start using Git. You can have a structure of trees (directories) and blobs (files) and make commits to save a collection of changes. Look at basic commands and read further about git here.
Vim is a modal editor, you can have different modes to insert text and avoid the usage of mouse or arrows keys. It has the following philosophy:
It is not so easy to learn, you need to start with a tutorial or guidance, and keep practicing it. You can see some commands and exercises here.
One of the readings was about how to create a user-based recommender in 5 minutes, and I applied that tutorial to the week exercise that it was about to create a simple movie recommender. To be able to do it I also used this other article to learn a little bit more about how dependencies work on Java.
Week Videos
I want to divide this into 2 sections: Life lections and fancy and complicated topics.
The videos about talks by Bret Victor and Marshal Goldsmith were about to find your passion, doing what you love, and do it now, it just doesn’t make sense to wait.
You can see some quotes from them here:
Also, Bret Victor mentions that the future of programming is more than coding and languages evolution, is about the programmer itself and accepting our vulnerability.
Another video I watched, was about moonshot thinking, and it says that is better to have bigger goals and risk so people can have fun and work better, so everyone could be happier, more inspired and motivivated.
Another really interesting talk, was La mejor presentación de tu vida by Enric Lladó, that mentions that you have to focus on yourself first to transmit your emotions to your audience, also you should make people think and feel what you need to they do.
Also, after you include one new thing to improve, it will be the best presentation of your life, for the next, you include 2 and it will be again the best presentation of your life, and so on to the infinite.
Now, let's start with the fancy topics.
Machine learning is a way to learn from data, you can train classifiers so they know how to classify new inputs from the older data it has. This playlist has more info from google.
The most important on machine learning is data, so we should be able to decide which information like features, we need or not to solve our specific problem.
The last topic, was Quantum stuff, and to be honest, it was (and still) complicated to understand.
The video about Quantum computing said is a different approach to how bits work, it introduces the qubits, which use superposition makes computing faster. And because of these qubits and its composition, we are fronting a physical barrier.
An about quantum mechanics well, is a really complicated topic, and these are my takeaways:
- it has a lot of applications
- it is the future
- it exists explanations for everything but we don’t know them.
if you want to give them an opportunity, you can see the videos in the next links.
The Quantum Conspiracy — Measure for Measure — Dr Quantum — Google and NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab
And one more thing, don't forget that we are just a super little small point in a really big universe how Carl Sagan explains.
See you next week 😉
