Ely += Tech

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[executed-deactivated20161004]

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A well-demonstrated example of closed position in social dancing.  It’s hard to tell from just one photo, but my guess is tango.

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Martin Odersky talks with Frank Sommers and Bill Venners about the compromises and most important goals in Scala's design, its object-oriented innovations, and what's in it for you.

Three months ago I would have understood ~15% of this interview.  Today I understand ~60%.  Progress!

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Almost cooler than actual volcanos. #lassenvolcanicpark #science #sandbox

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What they meant:Where to learn how DAG works under the hood in RDD?

What they asked on StackOverflow:Where to learn how DAG works under the covers in RDD?

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Headed to the #LWTSummit this weekend

Hit me up if you want to connect there.

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3d scan of a coelacanth by the Idaho Virtualization Laboratory 

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I spent this weekend at Fiddling Fool in Seattle.  What an amazing time!  16 hours of dancing later, I’m full of fresh insights on dance mechanics.  Between job hunting, this week is going to be all about expanding The Dancerator’s scope to include some of the wonkier dances that were left out the first go ‘round.  Who knows, I might even squeeze in some time for deployment.

Follow the fun here: https://github.com/ohrely/dancerator

[dinosaurspen]

Mathematician and pioneering software developer Phyllis Cady Johnson (right) and two unknown women working on an IBM calculating machine, date unknown. Johnson specialized in nuclear mathematics, first working at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and later Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she worked on the Manhattan Project and later went on to a career developing scientific software for the Atomic Energy Commission.

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My day, told through Python

inexplicable_environment_errors = 1 def fix_errors(errors): for error in errors: consult(stack_overflow) def consult(stack_overflow): if helpful_answer: implement(helpful_answer) else: cry() def implement(answer): inexplicable_environment_errors += 1 while inexplicable_environment_errors: fix_errors(inexplicable_environment_errors)

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What I worked on yesterday: building a browser extension in the spirit of Cloud to Butt or Millennials to Snake People, but with user-determined terms.  The page above is the Monty Python Wikipedia page when the extension is turned on.

Fun note: the code for switching “Monty”  to “I love” is a different approach from the code for switching “Python” to "LAMP”.  The Monty Approach was more familiar to me coming in (see it here on Github), but the Python Approach is much more elegant and, I expect, scalable (see it here on Github).

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Coding Inception

I'm taking a brief break from the Dancerator to focus on job search prep. To keep from getting rusty (and because it's fun), I'm also working on a small project modeling the movie Inception using various Python data structures. Here's my favorite bit of code from the project so far:

paradox = "a dream within a dream" plot = paradox.join(paradox.split("a dream")) print plot

Can you guess what it produces? Answer after the cut.

a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream

Check it out on Python Fiddle. You can view the repo for the entire project on GitHub. The data set I'm pulling together is on Google Drive.

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Career day tomorrow!  I’m so excited!

Here’s a clip from Dance Hack Day 2015.  The choreography was some of the first generated by my app, and it was my first time ever calling contra dances.  The dancers learned how to contra in about 20 minutes and were so much fun to work with.  Things got goofy pretty quickly, which is the best way to do contra.

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I know an update is long overdue - I’m planning a long one in the next couple of days.  For now, a thought on the video visualizer:

For the past month, I’ve gone back and forth on whether or not I should use video clips in the app.  The clips aren’t particularly useful for contra dancers - we all know what a swing looks like, and seeing a disjointed mashup of individual moves from several dances strung together doesn’t actually tell an informed user much.

I ultimately decided to include the clips anyway - I needed something to demonstrate to an uninformed user what the words on the screen mean, and the clips were the fastest way to do that.  I also got to explore the minefield that is video on the web, which could prove to be useful later (if for no other reason than because I now know how unpleasant it is to work with video in web browsers).

Now that the video clips are up and running, I’m extremely glad they’re there.  While I’ve still got big dreams for many features to come, the app now feels whole in a way it didn’t without the visualizer.

Unexpectedly, creating this feature turned out to be my most emotional experience so far at Hackbright.  It was wonderful to spend a day poring through videos of my DC, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore friends having a blast dancing, but it was hard not to dwell on the fact that I haven’t seen most of those people in months and I miss them enormously.

I’m super grateful to @dougplummer​ for letting me work with his footage.  His tendencies toward bird’s eye views and intimate close-ups yield videos that capture both the complexity and the joy of contra dancing.

[astonishingmaps]

Contra Dance Heatmap

Source: http://imgur.com/CSJ0wla