Monday, November 30, 2015

Doodling the Obscurity Out!

This blog started with the intention of redefining the way I understand Mathematics and approach Problem Solving in general. The Magic Wand of Programming has always been a faithful companion by my side;P

I do realize that when you read the recent posts you might think that Okay, this person knows how to code but that's not really the case - believe me, if you want to know the story behind all of this the pull up the very first set of posts I ever posted on the blog.

All, you'll find in these post is someone who is foolish enough to think that with a computer and an internet connection ( and a Lot of HardWork/Fun ) he can take good strides in catching up with the Frontier Men of Sciences. I am quite happy to still believe in this Mission of mine as I have poured out my dreams in this post - What if...? 

After reading so so many manuals and tech. books this year, on my own as opposed to the ones which were just imposed by the Education system, I started to look for different way to Learn Faster and exploring Memory Techniques, Visualizing et cetera - not to mention that this is also due to my other Great Passion which I blog about over at The Talking Apes, which too involves learning Huge number of things pretty quickly. So, I was genuinely trying to explore and understand my own learning style and how can I make the entire Learning Curve all the more fun.

I have found that it all points back to the Arts, to be Creative in the complete sense of the word. Arts and Science are so intimately related that a lop-sided education in either side is nothing short of a betrayal of the entire Purpose of Education. All it does is to convince people that they should be comfortable Walking, or worse still Crawling when they can Run.

As you probably know, if you have been reading my scribbles over here that I am learning Harmonica, Music Theory and Sketching as well. So, it's not all about programming and coding in my life - quite the contrary. Any problem I get stuck at Solves Itself, while I am engaged in another Creative activity like just humming out a tune or doodling a sketch and suddenly the Aha Moment happens. It's one of the most amazing feelings to have, I tell you.

Over the upcoming posts, have planned about 20+ of them, I am gonna explore and talk about my ToolKit which is The most important part of anything and everything which I wish to make, understand and explore. There is Tons of learning to come and I am actually looking forward to it eagerly but how can I make most of what I learn?

Of Course, by doing things, building things and using the knowledge real time. But there's another aspect to it, isn't it? Learning and Remembering things. I have found that there is this wonderful things call SketchNotes which I have become a huge fan of.

After being  mesmerized by this SketchNote techniques, which came my way via Sacha Chua's wonderful ways of doing things. There are many examples over here at SketchNotes Army

I doodled my very first Sketchnote only yesterday and it was initially with a Pencil and today I finalized it with a Pen. Isn't this a wonderful way to revise what you have learnt, I literally could remember every word of the TEDtalk I SketchNoted. And no, I don't think I'll be uploading it soon over here as I need to take care of the look and feel of the Blog first and then get the hang of the technical side of things of uploading content on a regular basis. But, soon enough, you'll start seeing doodles on the site.

Three programs which I felt compelled to add to my ToolKit are Inkspace, Krita and GIMP which will help me digitize my notes, which eventually will be the way I engage with Higher Mathematics, Linguistics and Physics related stuff over here - but that's probably a couple years in the future. First, I concentrate on refining my ToolKit and Learning How to Learn. Not to mention that the StartUp, I am working on is gonna be a huge part of my life all this time as well but I'll learn to manage things properly.

They say "Magic happens outside your comfort zone", I believe it from the bottom of my heart.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Take the Leap, Sage

I sincerely wish that SageMath makes the switch to Python3. It's been long postponed now!

This, believe it or not, is one of my wish list for 2016! 

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Demystifying Bokeh

Bokeh has rocked my brains for well over a month now and finally I have achieved that mythical moment of Epiphany and have deeply realized that it's nothing too difficult once you get your your head around the structure of the entire Library.

Basically it's just Python and once you understand the basic structure even a newbie programmer like me can play around with Bokeh and create awesome visuals for the browsers and IPython ( Jupyter ) notebooks.

Apart from the importance of Reading-the-docs, the real complexity of the entire thing arises from the fact that it's an intertwined pearl which deeply complements the other PyData stack. 

It's nothing too difficult to grasp, nor is it something which requires extensive knowledge of the Web Technologies at the very core - it's just a bunch of interactive lines on the page. The beauty being that we don't have to deal much with the JavaScript technology explicitly 'cos Bokeh does it for us.

Other components like Pandas, NumPy and Matplotlib, even Seaborn tightly integrate with Bokeh and to really improve at Bokeh and Visualizations in general - the rest of the Team-mates can't be overlooked. 

A Great playing ground to develop visualization skills is, of course, Matplotlib. The same being true generating Numbers for these visualets is NumPy and to make this data in an organized way we need to understand Pandas as well.

The Epiphany Moment, I talked about earlier was the fact that we can make all the plots in Bokeh using the [ bokeh.models ] subset of the entire library rather than relying on the High-Level and less customizable [bokeh.charts] module. Seriously, there is so much blood,-sweat-and-tears behind this little realization. Only later was I able to really create some useful plots. Just in time 'cos my exams are right around the corner=)


P.S - I am gonna lay low, the exam cops are on patrol again;P

When I come back I promise that there would be tons of Great Content and more learning stories I have planned. This last month has been one of the best ones in terms of the sheer amount I have explored and understood about various fields, ranging from

JavaScript
Python
Julia
IPython
HTML5/CSS,
CoffeeScript/Less
LilyPond
Haskell, Euterpea ( Computer Music )
Emacs
LISP (Scheme/Racket)
Web Scraping
Atom

I'll soon write up a Bokeh getting-started-guide as soon as my exams get over, probably by the month end.

Monday, November 9, 2015

More of a Reader than a Writer

I took it so lightly when they said " Most of the time you'll find yourself Reading programs rather than  Making them ".

One of the most prolific understatements I have known so far;P