Blessings Research Studio

Hi Folks, Here is the one pager on the research studio I’m putting together this fall.

Register here by Monday November 7th.

I’d love for you to be a part of the class :)

RC4

Douglass helped me with a bunch of stuff:

1. npm install sets dependencies for your website

2. webpack collects dependencies for many front-end libraries

3. you can make a function asynchronous with the async () functionality

4. he helped me make my code cleaner by removing an if-else statement

5. we used the words API to find synonyms

6. Conflict free replicated data type

RC3

1. Took a node tutorial that involved spinning up an Express server and MongoDB — I didn’t really finish

2. Realized the node is a “runtime environment” — which basically means I can call node from my console to run javascript — so I used this to try to read the bible.txt file I am parsing // it didn’t work

3. Paired with Douglass and made a lot of progress on Advice Column God

   • Was able to get fs.readFile working (it required an err argument as part of the callback)

   • watched Douglass write a reduce function to quickly find the longest word in a string

   • wrote a json object to a json file (this is our primary data structure for the ask g-d project) we did the variable assignment rigth from the writeFile function!

   • Douglass suggested I use the getElementById function only once, and then use variable names thereafter

   • Objects should be defined with const to protect them from being completely overriden, they can still be modified

   • Douglass also showed me how to use replace & regex on strings in javascript, which was powerful & useful

   • We ran into some issues with our textarea object — basically the inner html was set to whitespace bc I had space between my text area tags

RCD2

1. Sheridan showed me how to do a cool thing in browser console to kind of live evaluate JS expressions but now I forget how to do it or what it was

2. I paired with Natalie, who is working with some very beautiful video overlays — lots of artifacting - and also writes code that is very beautiful to look at. I’m excited about getting into Sublime formatting plugins

3. I asked Sheridan to pair again tomorrow, I responded to Zev’s request, and I posted in the JavaScript group — which I am excited about having done. We’ll see if anyone gets back to me

4. I sat in on the Machine Learning meeting group meeting

5. I’m excited to learn more about Zulip’s functionality

6. This morning I did some CodeWars work in JS, but I didn’t complete the Kata I started

7. I changed my approach to Advice Column God — I’m not defaulting to react any more, but I’m instead trying to build the app from the bottom up, importing frameworks & elements as I need them

8. I learned some new Unix commands like mv & cp

9. I learned the terms supervised & unsupervised as they relate to machine learning strategies/algorithms

10. I had lots of ideas, like:

    • e-ink “exposure”

    • force quit (suite of apps for limiting human computer interfacing)

    • singularity listeners — endpoints for listening to emerging machinic intelligences

    • recipes built by genetic algorithms!

    • more stuff

Recurse Day 1

I started Recurse Center today.

Some things:

1. I felt very emotional and happy during intros. Alicia said: “We want all of you to be here.” There is so much power in explicit, active, affirmations of acceptance.

2. I am excited allow myself to be a nerd. I’ve spent the past 20 years of my life trying to temper my pure interest and mental facility — with pursuits that (in theory) lend me more social cache or are deemed worthier than pure interest. I wonder how much of this tempered/scrambled self I can unravel in the next 12 weeks.

3. Chun Li showed me the SICP exercises he was working on in Racket. I think the syntax and simplicity of this language is beautiful. Chun Li was really nice while he was explaining how Racket works.

4. George and I worked on his JavaSript drawing accuracy tool.

   • I learned how to evaluate JavaScript in a browser (embedding a link to the remote file in a script tag)

   • I learned about some JavaScript control functions (javascript also has lambdas like ruby!)

   • I learned the phrase “No Premature Optimization”

   • I learned about the JavaScript ImageData object (this is a way to read all of the pixels of a canvas element)

   • I felt happy about what I was able to contribute to George’s project — primarily a general way to evaluate the accuracy of a drawing relative to a pre-existing image using ImageData

5. I can now call Sublime Text from the command line

6. I decided (temporarily) to focus on JavaScript during this batch (I feel good about this)

7. I started a CodeWars Kata in JavaScript and I’m excited to continue working on it tomorrow

Big Colorful Plastic Dumpsters

One of my favorite things about Barcelona are these big colorful plastic dumpsters that are neatly stored throughout Barcelona's streetscape. These are the things I like about them:

1. They are pretty and fun looking
2. They are inexpensive to produce
3. They are easy to use (see very clear color demarcations)
4. They make it so that garbage isn't just laying around on the street
5. They're flexible to deploy
6. Big trucks come around and just dump the contents of these — so it makes it less expensive for cities to collect garbage

This is what I ate for breakfast

Fried eggs on baguette w/ butter, avocado, sea salt & pepper

This is what I ate for dinner

Carmelized onion fried eggs w/ avocado & sea salt on fresh baguette with a side of sauteed spinach