In admiration of scripts
One of the things I always tell people when I talk about programming is it’s like you’re magic. I think I heard or read this somewhere when I started writing code as a teenager but it’s stuck with me ever since. Most code I write, as soon as I run it, makes me think about how magical it is to make a computer do something amazing. My undergraduate dissertation project  really hammered home this notion of magic. I was taking a single image of a face and figuring out where they were looking and it was working!
More recently I've been reminded of the magic of programming. I am completing an audio processing/machine learning project that requires the labelling of a reasonable amount of data. Due to the nature of how the data was collected this process was made even more difficult, the solution: scripts. More precisely python scripts (aside: python is fast becoming one of my favourite languages for testing ideas and algorithms quickly). I ended up writing a number of scripts to format my data and label files, reducing the risk of human error and speeding up the process so I could focus more on things like different filterbank implementations.
Back to the original point. The fact that, as a programmer, you have the ability to take a problem and find a solution no matter how small or large, that is absolutely magical. If that solution can then help other people then that's even better.
Extra stuff: I'm considering writing a post sometime soon about processing speech using the MFCC pipeline and also considering using Tensorflow to build some kind of simple speech recogniser (of course using python, at least for now).











