For my birthday this year, I got a Launchpad Mini Mk3. It's the first time I've used what is called a grid controller and I really found the workflow incredibly intuitive. Thanks to the really good key bindings, navigating Bitwig felt way more direct.
When it comes to adding dynamic functionality to websites, javascript is the number one technology. And javascript is not as bad as its reputation (or as it used to be). You can do really nice things with javascript—in particular in combination with css. Of course, javascript is not flawless, but it does the job. And after all, when it comes the dynamic functionality in websites, there isn't really that much competition...
About a year and a half ago, I came accross a tweet that said something like "Oh, Elm is so nice". For some reason, I looked it up. "A delightful language ..." is the first thing you see on their website. And oh—you need to compile it? To javascript? Doesn't that more or less defeat the purpose?
In an ancient time, I wrote code in C++ (see here for a now dead project I was involved in). Since then, python has clearly dominated my programming and I came to really love it: Python is concise, readable and easy to learn (and teach). And I really liked python's duck typing approach, which basically meant that you never really had to worry about types. Then, over the past maybe 5 years, a number of different people kept praising the elegance and power of scala and they often highlighted one particular strength of scala: static types. What!? Wasn't that something that I had never liked about C++ and that I was glad to leave behind?
In the past couple of weeks, I made it a point to do a number coding katas in all three of these languages. Not surprisingly, all three of them have their advantages.
The other day, I had lunch with my friend Ori Barbut and it turns out, we both seem to have a passion for a fairly mouse-free computer experience. However, the center pieces of our interaction with a computer are quite different; Ori uses emacs and I use vim. Ori is certainly interested in vim and I have quite extensively used emacs in the past, so much of the conversation circled around the why-and-why-not of the editors we are using.
I couldn't imagine writing any text on a computer without vim. Yet, the conversation with Ori made me think. Ori's environment can effortlessly do all kinds of things that sound really interesting.
According to my friend Kyle Becker, this interview question seems to throw off quite a few candidates. Honestly, it threw me off as well: I don't think I have a "favourite machine learning algorithm", I typically feel that the best solution is largely dictated by the problem to be solved. However, when thinking a little more about this question, I must admit that there are some ideas that I find very elegant and that certainly had a big impact on the way I think about data.