Keeping a Dev Journal

How many of you track your growth as a developer on a regular basis? I've been doing so for the last nine months, and I've found it rather rewarding. I thought I would write about it and share my experiences.

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Posted on 2016-02-24

The State of Multi-Line Input in Rakudo

Last week, I created an experimental branch for multi-line input in the Rakudo REPL. I merged this branch on Friday, but I wanted to talk about where we stand, and where I see us going in the future.

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Posted on 2016-02-15

Using latent semantic analysis to find synonyms in my Getting Things Done inbox

I try to use the Getting Things Done method to keep myself organized, but sometimes I wish that my computer could help share the load of that process. During my travels on the Internet, I discovered an algorithm called Latent Semantic Analysis (or LSA for short), which has some interesting natural language processing capabilities. I figured this would be a good application for my skills I gained from this language of the month. Let's explore my GTD inbox using this algorithm and my newfound powers of R!

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Posted on 2016-02-14

R Mateys!

For the first language of the month article, the choice was clear: I wanted to learn more about statistics, so I enrolled myself into a course on Coursera to learn about it. It just so happens that the course is taught using R, so I get to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. I won't bore you with an exhaustive overview of the syntax, so let's just touch upon some of the features R provides.

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Posted on 2016-02-07

Language of the Month

So, this year in 2016, I have a number of ambitious goals, two of which are related to this blog. The first goal is to write a blog post per week, which I've managed to do successfully thus far (although I'm often a bit off of my "publish every Monday morning" mark). The second is even more ambitious; so much so that I don't even know if I'll be able to keep with it the entire year.

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Posted on 2016-02-04