This year our team competed in the 2018 Kaggle Data Science Bowl. The goal of the competition was to identify cells in microscopic images. There can be zero, one or many cells in any given image. Our solution was a Convolutional Neural Network with skip connections.

Although Pokemon Go! may have introduced the general public to augmented reality technology, it hasn’t come close to demonstrating the revolutionary impact AR will have on virtually everyone’s life. With numerous potential applications across a wide range of industries, AR is going to improve healthcare, make cities safer, and boost the efficiency of manufacturing processes (just to name a few examples).

Pipenv is a new tool for managing dependencies and virtualenv environments for Python projects.

When working with data we typically make backups in case we make a mistake. In this age of high speed connections you still want to avoid transferring unnecessary data around, be it because it’s very large or you’re working over a cellphone connection. You can backup the data within the database.

Say you have an s3 bucket on amazon web services. You may want to programmatically empty it. In order to empty a bucket it must have items in it. So I’ll demonstrate how to put and remove items from a bucket. We’ll use the excellent boto3 library.

A Stack Trace is a report of the active stack frames at a certain point in time during the execution of a program. You should learn how to interpret these to debug live systems because in many cases a stack trace is all you have to solve a customer’s issue.

This turned out to be more time consuming than I’d like. I was testing a Node.js program that would log to stdout as prescribed by The 12 Factor Apps - Logs page.

If you need to quickly remove a file from a commit you just made …

Back in SF I found a great volume Great Papers in Computer Science. I got it for $1 at the library. When I lent it out to my friend I immediately missed it and decided to see if I could recreate it from freely available sources.

At my new job we have a Go backend. It’s a nice language with familiar syntax. Someone with C, C++, C# or Java experience will feel right at home. A language designed to make Software Engineering easier. At the same time it’s being sought out to address bottlenecks in Ruby, Perl, Node.js and Python codebases.