A Gap and Coursework
Extra week gap between notes this time around. My only defence is that nothing much is happening. All of my courses are ploughing ahead, things continue to go really well on that front. I got a few grades back from last semester, still waiting on two, but overall my average is really happily high for this point in the degree. Fingers crossed for the remaining.
The courses for this semester are proving much more difficult, as expected, but it’s fantastic to get my teeth into some of the tougher material. I’ve knocked the first two pieces of coursework back. One was a Sudoku solver, which I ended up using an Exact Cover representation to solve. That was particularly interesting to learn about, and the first time I’ve implemented an algorithm by the amazing Donald Knuth. Since I went a bit down the rabbit hole for that I’ll probably turn it into a blog post once the deadline has passed and I’ve submitted it.
For my course on Reinforcement Learning I’ve been getting to grips with the basics of Policy Iteration in a grid world. That was very interesting too, a little frustrating to get started with but when it clicks it’s very satisfying. Looking forward to making more progress with both of these across the semester.
Cool tip of the week
You can view code from GitHub via VS Code in the browser by adding ‘1s’ after GitHub in the URL. For example, you can view the code for this website (hosted through GitHub pages) by clicking here. Not that my site is that interesting, right now it’s just the default Jekyll theme and all of these posts (thinking about changing it up down the line).
This comes via conwnet.
Reading List
- Lanny, Max Porter
- Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots, Kate Devlin
- Stop Defacing Quotes With Brackets!
- Learning to Code vs Learning Computer Science (2014)
- The art of the cover letter
- Civil service tech jobs notion
- Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs
- Joan Didion’s ‘Let Me Tell You What I Mean’ shows a writer ahead of her time
- Quick Sort in Haskell
- Kids pick up stereotypes from generic statements
- Python Pattern Matching
- 5 Reasons why I love coding on Linux
- Python strings are immutable, but only sometimes
- Building Rich terminal dashboards
- Monolith First