Kotlin developers who want to get into data science: these articles are for you! They’re about using Jupyter Notebook, but with Kotlin instead of Python. Why should Pythonistas make all the big bucks?
Read the articles, which appear on RayWenderlich.com (the premier mobile development site, and it’s where I learned iOS and Android dev) in this order:
Beginning Data Science with Jupyter Notebook and Kotlin: Once you’re familiar with krangl, it’s time to get familiar with data frames and working with datasets. This article will help you get started by exploring real data, crunching it, and even getting some insights from it.
If you have doubts about cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and web3 in general and need some more convincing, you might find these arguments helpful. If you’re a true believer, these are the arguments you’ll have to counter. Either way, enjoy!
The “You’ll be running with a crowd of terrible human beings” argument
Tap to view the original tweet
The article Bitcoin Goes to War in The New Republic has a subtitle that explains its thesis a little better: “For some crypto holders, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an opportunity—and a validation of their increasingly radical beliefs.”
However, I feel that the best summary comes from a sentence in the middle of the article, which reads “For some right-wing libertarian-minded coiners, the right to freely trade crypto takes precedence over opposing a Russian invasion of a sovereign nation.”
Nothing drives this point home better than investor Mike Alfred’s Twitter response to Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, who asked:
I'm asking all major crypto exchanges to block addresses of Russian users.
It's crucial to freeze not only the addresses linked to Russian and Belarusian politicians, but also to sabotage ordinary users.
He points out that the blockchain data structure isn’t anything revolutionary, but instead is based on decades-old, well-documented structures: hash chains and hash trees (a.k.a. Merkle trees):
He also talks about the excuses that crypto-fans make for its massive power consumption…
…how easy it is to steal or grift from other people…
…that it just created a new business model for VCs…
If you (or someone you know) has heard of cryptocurrency and NFTs but doesn’t know much about them or why they’re getting a lot of hype, Dan Olson’s Line Goes Up — The Problem with NFTs explains everything quite well.
Don’t let the 2-hour 18-minute runtime scare you off — it’s broken into chapters and presents its material so well that you won’t even notice the time passing.
02:13:21 13. I Know It’s Rigged, But It’s The Only Game In Town
The artsy English-accented argument
English Youtuber and musician Georgina “munecat” Taylor does a wonderful takedown of the entire Web 3.0 scene, and while the video clock in at over an hour and forty minutes, it’s a very entertaining and informative watch.
The “Fucked Company” argument
If you were around during the dot-com bubble’s burst, you might remember a website called Fucked Company (whose name s a pardoy of Fast Company) that chronicled the ongoing failures of dot-coms with maximum snark.
There’s now a Web3 version: Web3 is going just great, and it’s part of my daily cautionary reading. Check it out.
Once again, it’s September 13th — the 256th day of the year (on non-leap years)! As the number of values that can be expressed in a single byte, 256 means something to programmers, and as the largest power of 2 that will fit into 365, the 256th day of the year is a perfect excuse to declare it as Day of the Programmer.
Here are some things that you might find useful on this special day…
There’s Humble Bundle’s Python Superpowers bundle, which provides a lot of goodies for $25, including some really good Python video courses, ebooks, and a 6-month free license of PyCharm Professional Edition!
I stumbled across the headline I really hate the Medium experience, which resonated with me because — well, I really hate the Medium experience. When I tried to follow the link to read the article, I was presented with this:
Tap the image to view the terribleness at full size.
And that perfectly (and self-referentially too!) sums up the Medium experience.
If you’re writing developer articles, don’t write on Medium.
It won’t grow your audience or your reputation, the knowledge you’re trying to share will remain hidden as developers look elsewhere for answers, and you won’t be in control of your own content. Medium promises monetization, but speaking as someone who used to be able to pay the rent on Adsense revenues, articles don’t monetize that well anymore, and Medium pays worse.
Get a domain, set up whatever publishing system works for you, and post your articles there.
This article is part of the Android August series, in which I’m writing an Android development-related article every day during the month of August 2021.
The is the original demo of Android on a mid-2000s phone, showing a home screen and a selection of apps, most of which weren’t implemented at the time. Hey, it was a demo for a pitch! (Photo by Chet Haase)
It was later decided that the camera market wasn’t big enough, and that Android should aim for the same space occupied by the big mobile operating systems at the time: Symbian (the most popular mobile OS until 2010) and Windows Mobile. They courted Samsung and HTC, but in July 2005, Google made the prescient decision to acquire Android for $50 million. According to Wikipedia, this move was described in 2010 as Google’s “best deal ever” by their then VP of corporate development, David Lawee, to whom I reported during the dot-com era at OpenCola.
The first commercially-available Android device: The HTC Dream, also known as the T-Mobile G1, released September 2008. (Creative Commons photo by Michael Oryl.)
Androids is an insider’s history of the Android operating system, but Haase also promises that it won’t be above a non-techie’s head:
All of this. It's not a technical book (I wanted people are *aren't* engineers to enjoy it too), but does cover a lot of the early pieces and decisions, along with many stories from the trenches.
Instead, it’s a history: It describes the events, stories, experiences, thinking, and decisions made by the Android team, most notably in the early days, well before the present-day concept of a smartphone existed.
Want to find more about the book? Check out these articles:
The bundle is sold in tiers. If you pay only $1, you get this portion of the bundle, which makes for a great starter set for younger readers or if you’re thinking of getting into game development:
In my opinion, the stand-out book in this tier is Serious Python, which cover languages features, tools, and techniques that you’ll need as you start writing applications that you or your customers will regularly use and rely upon.
Even though I bought the 2020 edition of this bundle, I bought the 2021 edition just to get Real World Python is a great way to learn some new tricks through its tour of algorithms and Python libraries. It was cheaper to buy the bundle than to buy Real World Python on its own. Do the math: You can pay $28 for Real World Python, or get all the books in the bundle for $10 less!
The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers. The majority of the PSF’s work is focused on empowering and supporting people within the Python community. The PSF has active grant programs that support sprints, conferences, meetups, user groups, and Python development efforts all over the world. In addition, the PSF underwrites and runs PyCon US, the primary Python community conference. Being part of the PSF means being part of the Python community. Recently we changed the PSF to an open membership organization, so that everyone who uses and supports Python can join.
The No Starch Press Foundation is an IRS 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt non-profit corporation created to support and grow the collective knowledge and contributions of the worldwide hacker community.
We support hackers of all types, regardless of experience — whether that’s the passionate beginner or the lifelong hacker wishing to make a broader contribution to the hacker community and the world.
The Foundation was formed to give back to and strengthen the hacking community. The Foundation’s founder, William Pollock, has been closely involved with the hacking community since about 1999 and much of the success of his company, No Starch Press, is due to the support of the worldwide hacking community. To date, Pollock has given over $800,000 to the Foundation and is working to expand its donor base. The Foundation’s funding will be used to help strengthen and expand the hacking community, by educating the public about hacking and working to create safe and central places for the hacking community.
