Participate in the 2020 Virtual ML.NET Hackathon

If you wanted to learn machine learning then join us in the Virtual ML.NET Hackathon! Here you can create or join a project to have fun, learn ML.NET and machine learning, and help contribute to open source.

For anyone not familiar with ML.NET there will be a workshop presented on November 13th to go over the basics of ML.NET.

Schedule

The workshop will be on November 13th and will start at 10AM Pacific or 1PM Eastern.

The week to officialy start hacking on your ML.NET code is from November 13th to November 20th.

Submissions of your projects or contributions will be on November 18th. And the winners of the hackathon will be announced on the 20th.

Sign ups have already started and feel free to reference the official schedule.

How to Sign Up

To sign up for the workshop and/or the hackathon, fill out this form. The first 50 to sign up will get a free tshirt!

Creating or Joining a Project

To create a project simply create an issue in the GitHub repository. When signing up feel free to describe the project or contribution you want to submit. You have the option to specify if you want others to join your project as part of a team as well to specify if you would like a mentor to help you with your project.

If you see a project that's already listed as an issue and it specifies they would like others to join their team, simply comment on the issue indicating you would like to join.

Note that, for your project, if you are using a dataset, to make sure that it doesn't have any personal information in it.

Submissions

Final submissions are due November 18th. To submit, create a pull request in the repo in the Submissions folder. Submissions must include a README file indicating what was done for a solution to the project or what was contributed, any source code used for the project, and a 1 to 3 minute video showing or talking about your project or contribution.

Submissions do not have to be fully complete or to run to be counted.

Exercism F# Track Now Available

Wait....F#?

Yep. After attending an interesting talk by James Dixon on data in F# I got a bit interested in the language. Of course, that's followed by reading articles, watching videos, and playing with it a bit on my own. The past month or so I've been messing around with it and plan on sticking to it for a while.

I can see F# going places in terms of functional programming and it's uses within .NET. Be prepared for more F# posts in the future, as well.

What is Exercism?

In short, Exercism is another site where people can learn a new programming language by doing different exercises. The difference with this one than the others, however, is that it's crowd-sourced. Meaning that, once you finish an exercise, you can send it off to be code reviewed by others.

It's definitely the best of both worlds where you practice the language and get peer reviews to help you learn that much quicker.

F# Track

And so, since I got interested  a bit more in F# and no one started messing with it in the Exercism F# repository, I figured I'd give it a shot. After a little while I was able to get it to meet the requirements to be launched!

Hopefully, I did decently in my own examples for the exercises (and if not, I'm not scared of some helpful tips), and that some people can get a bit of use out of it.

So feel free to give it a try and let me know or submit an issue if there are any problems!

My First Speaking Engagement is Official

I've often thought about being the one in front of the room during a code camp or some other speaking event. Though, like most of us, I've always been reluctant to put myself up there, scared that someone will call me out on not knowing what I was talking about or, worse yet, they all walk out on me.

However, with the fine coworkers at Wintellect and other friends, I decided to bite the bullet and sign up as a speaker for the Carolina Code Camp this year. After a couple of days of debating with myself on what to talk about, I decided that a talk on the JavaScript garbage collector would be interesting. I've always enjoyed learning about performance and this should be practical for others to learn as well.

So if you're near the Charlotte, NC area on Saturday, May 3, I encourage you to attend what has always been a great event since I've been going three years ago. Hope to see you there! If you end up going and even go to my session, try to refrain from throwing things.

The JavaScript Garbage Collector Demystified

First Wintellect Blog Post + A New Series On Design Patterns

Just recently, I published my first blog post to the Wintellect (my awesome new employer) site. May not seem like much, but it's pretty exciting for me.

One of the things to keep yourself learning, I feel, is to tackle the stuff you feel you understand the least. For me, one of those things was the concept and implementation of different design patterns. I'm probably already too late in the game for this, but better than not learning it at all, right?

Head First Design Patterns - Part 1: Observer Pattern

Small Change: Disqus Comments

After noticing that more and more blogs and other web content are moving toward using Disqus as their medium for comments, I thought it would be best to move mine over to the platform as well.

The main advantage I wanted to gain for the readers here is that there is one less thing for them to have to register and/or worry about following. With Disqus, you have all your comments and actionable items in one place and users have the ability to even use it via a login from other social media sites. It's a total win-win situation!