Notes on codes, projects and everything
Implementing a Information Retrieval system is a fun thing to do. However, doing it efficiently is not (at least to me). So my first few attempts didn’t really end well (mostly uses just Go/golang with some bash tricks here and there, with or without a database). Then I jumped back to Python, which I am more familiar with and was very surprised with all the options available. So I started with Pandas and Scikit-learn combo.
So I first heard about Panda probably a year ago when I was in my previous job. It looked nice, but I didn’t really get the chance to use it. So practically it is a library that makes data looks like a mix of relational database table and excel sheet. It is easy to do query with it, and provides a way to process it fast if you know how to do it properly (no, I don’t, so I cheated).
I was invited to try Go (the programming language, not that board game) a few months ago, however I didn’t complete back then. The main reason was because it felt raw, compared to other languages that I know a fair bit better (for example Ruby). There was no much syntatic sugar around, and getting some work done with it feels “dirty”.
Recently I am involved in developing some small modules for a enterprise class website using CodeIgniter (CI). There was no restriction given on which framework should I use for the development and I chose CI as I learned a bit on it (when I was considering whether to shift my personal development project). Of course there are other reasons why I chose to learn CI, for example the superior documentation and screencasts available.
Had a discussion with my secondary supervisor and it turned out pretty bad because I wasn’t fully prepared and he was rushing to somewhere else for a meeting. So I am jotting down a brief summary (read: highly based on personal/subjective feelings/opinions) of my readings here to help organize things before the followup meeting that is taking place next week.
I was thinking whether it is possible to avoid exposing PDO and PDOStatement objects to the users of my database library (mainly just me). While I was working on my project I sort of notice that there is a almost fixed pattern whenever I work with the database. With this in mind, I added in some new functions to the library, and decided to make a quick release for this.
A few years ago, I was asked to build a game or simulation (alongside 2048) as a part of a job application. Being very impressed with Explorable Explanations, I implemented Conway’s Game of life with Javascript and jQuery (that was before ES6 became popular). Then I made a very simple grid maker jQuery plugin to dynamically generate a grid of divs. If you check the source code, you may realize I rely on Underscore.js a lot back then.
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