Week 4 at Nearsoft/Encora Academy
This week was about fancy topics everywhere. As every week is passing, we dive deeper into programming things. So it’s always getting more exciting.
Exercises are more interesting every time. This time we had to dive into a database of about 9GB and clean the data for parsing it with an algorithm that gives movie recommendations to a user. To do so, we had to read one of the articles from the weekly resources. The recommender was written in Java, so for me, it was not trivial since I have little experience with the language. Since building, downloading, and installing dependencies to remember how to work with POO.
Fortunately, the problem didn’t take me more than 2 days. Knowing what to use was key for solving this problem, and my partners in the academy were always cheering up each other and helping in whatever we could.
We get to know about how recommendation engines work at some level so we can better understand how platforms like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and so on work.
Weekly Resources
In the beginning, I started reading some articles which were from how to implement some algorithms to give users recommendations. We also went deep into how TDD (Test Driven Development) works and how Unit Testing plays its role in it.
Since I wanted to do as much as I could, I also started watching some videos about quantum physics and Machine Learning. I was already familiar with these topics. Indeed they reminded me about a book that’s pretty much about what we saw because it covers the same examples that this book has, although with fewer details.
A few years ago I saw some videos about quantum computing and I started look every video and resource that I could handle at that time for a few months, so it was algo like go back a few years and remember how exciting the topic is.
One thing that I really enjoyed was learning about how to use git and vim, work with the command line, somehow, feels more fluid than with the GUIs.
The last thing that I will always keep in mind was the advice about how to do the best presentation of your life. I actually applied what I learned immediately in my presentation this week.
Conclusion
The constant reminder of failing fast is getting into me. This pursues the goal to try things as they come to your mind, so it’s faster the way you discard bad ideas and found the good ones. This is how we build innovation.
As fast as you get a good idea and you embrace it, you can turn it into your principle, so your path is clearer to follow your dreams.
