My pull request was merged! Now what?

So, you’ve just made a contribution to an open-source project on Github by creating a pull request and having it merged by the project’s administrators! Congratulations, you’re a rockstar! …But now what do you do? How do you clean up your fork and your local copy of the repository? It’s a pretty simple process, but involves a few steps; here they are all written down in one place.

Notes from ‘Neural Networks for NLP’

These are my notes from the tutorial “Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing”, given by Yoav Goldberg at the German Research Center for AI (DFKI) at Saarland University on March 16, 2016. Often, NNs tutorials use examples from the field of image processing, so it was really nice to hear a tutorial focused on linguistic data and analysis. Here’s an overview of the most important things I took away from the talk; check out the notes below and the PDF version of the tutorial for more details.

Notes from FOSDEM 2016

The Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) just concluded its 2016 edition in Brussels, Belgium. It was my first time attending this huge, fascinating, registration-free conference, and I really enjoyed the chance to become more familiar with the FOSS community and its ideals, and learn about some very cool projects and technologies. Here’s a quick summary of what I took away from FOSDEM, along with my notes from the talks I attended.

So flexbox, much wow!

Flexbox is amazing. Today I learned that it is a thing, and it straight up exploded my brain with its awesomeness. Let’s talk about how awesome it is, so that your brain may get exploded too!

Comic-inspired pairing

Today at the Recurse Center, Shad and I both had a spare half-hour, so we decided to do a little pair programming. (Pairing is a common occurrence at RC; it’s one way Recursers take advantage of each others’ experience, curiosity, and energy. And it’s so much fun!)

World, say hello to Kimi!

In week 7 of my batch here at the Recurse Center, I started (and finished) a new project: creating and interpreting a programming language. My goal for this language was less to build a language you can actually code in, and more to simply learn about programming languages and interpreters, as this is something I find really interesting but have almost no experience with.

Cleaner commits with git add -p

Today I learned how to use git add -p (short for git add --patch) to make smaller, cleaner, more isolated git commits. My life is changed.