Background: I’m definitely no expert, and have no formal education, in machine learning (ML) nor artificial intelligence (AI), but I’m fascinated and intrigued by the technologies. I’ve been learning about them and building apps with them on my own for the past few years.

In this series of posts, I’ll explain what I know, how I got to where I am, how I’ve used them in my projects, and chart a course for my future with them. Hopefully this process will push me to learn more and may help those who later head down this path. …

Exception handling in Ruby and life

As a student in the Flatiron School’s web development program, we’ve learned to use Ruby on Rails for the backend. Until recently, we’ve not had to be concerned with exceptions.

Exception handling, where your code anticipates possible errors and “rescues” the application from crashing, is key to developing code that has to interface with the often predictable unpredictability of the real world.

One area where exception handling is required is when using APIs for web-based services such as Twitter, Google and countless others. Not all exceptions mean that something went wrong; they can also…

You don’t develop code. Code develops you.

During a recent lecture via Zoom in the Flatiron School software program, I attempted to crack-wise on the chat as my fellow students and I often do. I can’t exactly remember what prompted me, but I wrote:

“You don’t develop code. Code develops you.”

Although I was trying to make a joke, this stuck with me. I believe it’s true, if you’re serious about learning how to code (well).

What do I mean by “code develops you”? A few things come to mind, but the overarching truth about code development for me is:

…

Don’t let synchronous code upset yourMomma and spoil Thanksgiving

Javascript is a single-threaded programming environment. That means that typically your Javascript code can only be doing one thing at any point in time. Generally this restriction isn’t an issue for many operations, like adding numbers or updating a variable in memory; generally a task that can be completed in one pass through Javascript’s event loop.

The issue with a single thread becomes clear when a program needs to perform an operation that may take a long time to complete, like reading a large file from a disk or uploading a…