/blog

Been doing some Machine Learning “learning” in the past two weeks. I’m interested in learning to use TensorFlow.js at a decent level and solve a personal problem — software estimation and road-mapping, for the teams I work with. This has led me down the darkest alleys of Machine Learning blogs. Most of the relevant material I found uses TensorFlow but with Python. I understand why data scientists choose Python over other languages.

I recently had to create a CSV from some data returned by the Jira API. Went on the Internets to find a module on NPM that would do the job. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a single module that would perform only that simple task. We were already using a module to generate Excel exports, inside the application, but it was generating XLSX files. It also looked like it has a funky license, so I decided to drop it altogether.

I saw an answer request for the following question, on Quora. What is your story of going from zero to hero, and changing your life completely in the face of faliure? I though about it for a while. It seemed shallow. Someone was looking for nice stories to feed their procrastinating, motivation-searching, lazy ego. Then I thought some more. I remembered something Jordan Peterson mentioned, related to Carl Jung : If you can’t figure out a person’s motivations from the conversation, look at the outcome and infer their motivations.

You write code everyday. You’d be forgiven for assuming you write code for yourself. At the end of the day you’re the one who’s going to deliver that task. Why not implement it to your liking? It’s all about you, right?! Well, not quite! Because you won’t be the only one working on that project. Even if that is the case, you won’t be the same person, 3 months from now, when you will touch that feature again for an enhancement.

Here are two simple versions of the checkout and rebase subcommands I use to perform faster branch updates and merges. Check out the last visited branch git checkout - This command is useful if, let’s say, for example, you were on master and you checked out to a new feature branch. You work on the feature and once you’re done, you want to switch back to master, get remote changes and then pull them in your feature branch as well, so you have the latest changes and check for any integration conflicts with other people’s work.

Numerous battles have been carried out by developers with JavaScript’s Math. Today, I found some big news on the web, about BigInt landing in V8. Mathias Bynens — BigInt: arbitrary-precision integers in JavaScript Adding BigInts to V8 Source Code — v8/src/objects/bigint.h It’s not going to rid us of BigNumber.js just yet, but it’s probably going to serve as the starting point for implementing BigDecimal. Currently, there are a dozen variants to handle big numbers in JavaScript without touching Math, ranging from keeping the numbers as strings to keeping the integer part and the fraction as separate strings in an array and join them together at a later time to using third party libraries which more or less use the same strategies I mentioned before.

I’ve been trying to make time to learn Go since 2015. I’ve been on and off with it, tried various resources, hacked on a couple of projects, but I still don’t have the confidence necessary to work on real-life projects and put Go on my CV. For the past couple of months I’ve been working with a company that does blockchain projects. Due to the specific requirements of ICOs and crypto exchanges, the need for more structure and predictability from the language/platform has become increasingly obvious.

I receive a notification from Quora. Someone had asked me to answer this question. At first, I was tempted to give the “Learn the language basics and then go for libraries” sermon. But I stood and thought for a moment. Since the time I used to obsessively preach that, I went through a lot of teams, mindsets and technology stacks. I saw that neither the teams or the businesses needed people who were experts at language fundamentals.

Recently I took a lot of interest in Golang. I was listening to the GO TIME podcast — GoLand IDE and managing Gopher Slack and there was a lot of chatter about IDEs vs. editors. What sparked my interest was the discussion around working with Git from the command line vs. using the IDEs built-in tools. This is what motivated me to write about the workflow I have with Git.

jQuery is not dead! I’d love to say it is, but it is alive and kicking. Unfortunately, its existence hit the team I’m currently working with, and it hit pretty hard. We had this admin panel built on an older version of the Metronic theme, and the bootstrap-datetimepicker the theme used was giving us headaches. It would randomly reset to 12/31/1899 when losing focus. We were using UTC time and so our dates had this format DD/MM/YYYY HH:ii UTC.