If you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to at the Recurse Center, here’s a list of my weekly updates! I wrote each update immediately after the week ended, so my progress was fresh on my mind. Lightly edited from the version posted on the Recurse Center messaging interface.

tl;dr

• Pair-programmed with 20 people
• Wrote 20 modules and 12 additional test modules
• Contributed to 8 repositories
• Visited 8 churches, 10 parks/memorials, and 5 museums
• Wrote 7 blog posts
• Watched 17 PyCon talks
• Gave 3 “lightning presentations” (5 min)
• Posted 127 tweets
• Finished reading 5 books
• Started reading another 5 books
• Made 3 batches of ice cream

 

Week 1 (Aug 14-20)

• Built a (super duper) toy recommender system. It doesn’t work yet. But it’s getting there 😀
• Made my first HTTP request and started to read about data APIs
• Looked into the data API for Charity Navigator, which (I think?) will be a good data set for my project
• Watched some Dave Beazley and Raymond Hettinger Python talks
• Set up a statistics/ML study group with Karen Ellenberger and Jayant Jain
• Talked about testing with Nathan Weeks Shane and Kate Ray
• Paired on a computer vision project with Wesley Aptekar-Cassels
  
• Ate delicious salad with Kate Murphy and Kate Ray
  
• Threw off my sleep schedule by staying up way too late reading a book
• Found a church I really like (yay!)
• Planned out a few projects/goals (in no particular order)
  • Building the charity recommender system
  • Completing the Mode Analytics SQL tutorials
  • Learning about Python generators
  • Reviewing basic statistics and ML concepts
  • Building Verbal Infusions, a TwitterBot that generates herbal tea copy
  • Reading/contributing to Python’s scikit-learn and scikit-image libraries
  • Pair with at least one person every day

 

Week 2 (Aug 21-27)

• Watched James Powell’s PyData talk about generators. SO GOOD. It made me think about how to structure code for reproducibility.
• Got my API code up and running, and now I can make HTTP requests to the Charity Navigator database.
• Refactored my API code so that it uses generators to handle pagination in the CN data API.
• Reminded my very rusty brain how classes work in Python.
• Refactored my recommender system code so that it’s better-structured for reproducibility.
• Started studying up on divide-and-conquer algorithms (yay mergesort)
• Started studying intermediate/advanced Python concepts with Brennan Holt Chesley, Dan Luu, and Michael Noronha
  
• Paired on a Pandas project with Kate Ray
• Talked with Jake Hickey about image processing
• Attended the ACT-W conference in Boston and got way too excited about writing a stock market predictor 😀 😀 😀

 

Week 3 (Aug 28-Sep 3)

• Watched a bunch of talks
  • Andrew Knight’s talk on testing in Python was a super-helpful overview of testing frameworks in Python and how people think about testing
  • Dan Crosta’s talk on testing helped me make sense of some of the contradictory advice about testing I’ve encountered
  • Colton Myers’s talk on decorators was helpful in starting to learn…what decorators are
• Built some (very tiny) test suites for my recommender system in unittest, doctest, pytest, and hypothesis
  • Paired with Wesley Aptekar-Cassels to build the unittest and also learned random facts about Python classes
  • Paired with Elias Dorneles and Anja Boskovic to build the hypothesis framework and also learned random facts about vim
• Continued the intermediate/advanced Python study group, learned about Python’s package structure
• Paired on a Pandas problem with Parker Higgins
  
• Continued stats study with Jayant Jain
  
• Paired with Jake Hickey on diffusion algorithms in image analysis and learned SO MUCH about vim, C++, and system memory
• Went to the generative testing talk given by Brennan Holt Chesley
  
• Did a bunch of algorithms study and tried to figure out how quicksort works

 

Week 4 (Sep 4-10)

• Figured out how quicksort works! And learned about a related randomized selection algorithm.
• Blogged about my testing experience, with many cat pictures.
• Continued the intermediate/advanced Python study group, learned about profilers and a little about parsing/context-free grammars
• Continued stats study with Jayant Jain, paired on building probability distribution simulators
• Paired with Jake Hickey on diffusion algorithms in image analysis, talked about floating-point arithmetic
• Bought an emotional support plant 😀

 

Week 5 (Sep 11-17)

• Read up on a lot about statistics (regression, classification) and floating-point arithmetic.
• Spent a bunch of time looking over the recommender system, and blogged about it (yay cat pictures!)
• Built some more probability distributions with Jayant Jain
  • We modeled a bunch of major discrete probability distributions
  • We discussed how continuous distributions are built in scipy.stats and came up with real-world continuous distribution examples
• Presented about generators at the Thursday evening activities
• Did practice interviewing with Kenneth Alexander Durril and Abraham Hmiel
• Weekend shenanigans! Commentated Movie Night, walking in Prospect Park with Allie Crevier, made ice cream with Brennan Holt Chesley and then ate it at Sundae, Sundae, Sunday!

 

Week 6 (Sep 18-24)

• I made a WHOLE BUNCH OF PROGRESS on the herbal tea parody Twitter Bot!
  • Built a recursive breadth-first web crawler/scraper to obtain a bunch of herbal tea descriptions. (Parker Higgins helped a bunch.)
  • Cleaned the HTML data with Beautiful Soup and Kenneth Alexander Durril, creating a text corpus for the Twitter Bot.
  • Refactored my code a bunch so now it’s pretty and readable.
  • Tried out a profiler and found out that my web scraper really needs some concurrency because wow network requests take a lot of time.
• Speaking of refactoring, I watched two great PyCon videos about refactoring!
  • Brett Slatkin’s video about when to refactor for readability
  • Jack Diederich’s video asking people to please stop writing unhelpful classes
• Wrote a blog post about HTTP requests.
• Learned about some basics of linked lists during interview practice with Christian Ternus and Brennan Holt Chesley (among others)
• Had a meeting with Nancy Thomas about my jobs profile and setting up job interviews.
• Visited Coney Island with Kimberly Michelle McCarty and Justyna (JJ) Janczyszyn
• Visited the Cloisters with Natalia Rodriguez and ate some DELICIOUS Venezuelan sandwiches!

 

Week 7 (Sep 25-Oct 1)

• Finished the herbal tea parody Twitter Bot, at least enough that I’m ready to put it down and prioritize other projects.
  • Read through the tweepy source code and wrote the Twitter Bot infrastructure.
  • Wrote the code to make the Markov-generated tweets, and then refactored and improved everything.
  • Set up a cron job so the Twitter Bot posts new herbal tea description parodies daily.
• Learned that debuggers are the greatest – I wrote a blog post about that and gave a presentation.
• Paired with Jake Hickey to implement Cascading Fast Explicit Diffusion
  • And learned a ton about writing for the GPU in the process!
  • Also I wrote more or less my first C++ code and I think I’m in love. SO MANY DETAILS. SO PRECISE.
• Spent a day practicing Git basics with https://learngitbranching.js.org/, I highly recommend.
• Visited a friend in Philly and saw lots of historical things. Fun fact: did you know that one dude once held 95% of the US government’s loans to wage the War of 1812? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Girard

 

Week 8 (Oct 2-8)

• Fixed my algorithms code, which was immensely satisfying.
• Paired with Omar Bohsali to read an articles about asyncio, and play around with concurrency ideas a bit.
• Read a bunch about tail call optimization, probability, coroutines, and asyncio.
• Refactored my web scraping/crawling code to make it more generalizable, and then started making it asynchronous.
• Did more thorough study of graphs, including BFS and DFS.
• Wrote most of a blog post about generators.
• Worked with Abraham Hmiel to read through referee comments on an astrophysics paper I’m trying to publish.
• Had a much-needed visit to MA, during which I got to hang out with family and go apple-picking and watch the cranberry harvest (yay) and re-injured my wrist (boo).

 

Week 9 (Oct 9-15)

• Watched some helpful PyCon videos:
  • Dave Beazley on Python concurrency
  • Dave Beazley on understanding the Python GIL
  • Miguel Grinbert on async Python (SO HELPFUL)
  • Yury Selivanov on async/await and asyncio
• Wrote my asynchronous web scraper, and it appears to work! Paired with Kimberly Michelle McCarty, Laura White-Avian, and Anja Boskovic in the process 🙂
• Practiced my vim skillz with Anja Boskovic
  
• Worked some practice interview questions.
• Practiced BFS and DFS
• Went to the resume-writing/code review workshops with Emil Sit and got some very helpful advice on both.
• Talked to folks at the job fair.

 

Week 10 (Oct 16-22)

• Refactored and tested the asynchronous web scraper – it works now! Glory be!
• Learned about a bunch of features of pytest (fixtures, mocks/patching, pytest.raises, parametrization, why you want to use CI). Turns out I really like testing, a lot.
• Finished some practice interview questions, which gave me a much better sense of what data science interviews are like and which Pandas commands to have at my fingertips.
• Updated my resume and jobs profile, and talked to lots of people at the RC jobs fair.
• Compiled a list of places I might want to apply for jobs, and did a practice interview (during which I learned what a trie is! 😀 😀 😀 )
• Had a really nice weekend showing my mom around New York City and playing games with Brian Glusman et al.
• Agreed to an ill-advised incentive scheme for applying to jobs.

 

Week 11 (Oct 23-29)

• Started scraping data for the charity recommender project, now I have an ugly mess of HTML to go through. (Yay! 😀 )
• Paired with Julian Squires on fixie tries.
• Finished my blog post about generators and a blog post about how I respond when I don’t want to code.
• Worked more on practice-interviewing and algorithms (BFS/DFS and Dijkstra’s algorithm).
• Paired with Jake Hickey on…mostly just installing stuff for the CFED project. And ate yummy food and talked about block chains (Kimberly Michelle McCarty) and Karatsuba multiplication (Kadeem Nibbs).
• Finished the paper comment review I started with Abraham Hmiel.
• Followed up with folks I met at the job fair, as well as a few connections in San Francisco.
• Cleaned up my resume/LinkedIn/GitHub/Recurse Center jobs profile, so I’m all ready for job applications.

 

Week 12 (Oct 30-Nov 5)

• Did some significant HTML parsing for the Charity Navigator project with Elly Kuhlman.
  
• Paired on building tries with Julian Squires and Kadeem Nibbs.
• Started to write a blog post listing everything I’ve accomplished at RC.
• Paired with Jake Hickey on image compression.
• Made and ate ice cream (White Russian flavored! Alcoholic and yummy!)
• Nevergraduated!