The Joys Of Programming

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I'm working on a fun little project right now that I had exactly zero background on when I started, but I've learned quite a bit! I'm running all the GWJ Conference Calls through a Speech-to-Text pipeline to generate transcripts and then put those through an LDA topic model to see the evolution of the podcast and topics over time.

Took me quite a while to get my Google Cloud account set up right and feed all the correct credentials but once I did I've been rolling along! So far I've spent almost $200 of my $400 in free GCP credits and processed over 5000 minutes of podcast. I'll definitely continue to document my progress as I go and share the results in a forum thread once I get them. At the current pace it's going to take another 5 days of processing and at least 4 more free Google trials with alternate emails to get everything parsed.

That’s awesome! I’m keen to see some results.

staygold wrote:

I'll definitely continue to document my progress as I go and share the results in a forum thread once I get them.

I'm looking forward to this Awesome project

CPWilson wrote:
staygold wrote:

I'll definitely continue to document my progress as I go and share the results in a forum thread once I get them.

I'm looking forward to this Awesome project

I can only hope to approach the level of your awesome infographics!

Update 1: I'm through nearly 100 podcasts for speech to text. Running some intermediate descriptive statistics:

  • 86 podcasts
  • 115 hours, 11 minutes, 28 seconds, 93 milliseconds of podcast time
  • 815 895 spoken words (+/- about 15%, the accuracy isn't superb on the speech-to-text)
  • 3 965 324 characters in the words
  • $222.89 CDN in compute cost
  • $28.99 CDN in federal/provincial taxes
  • 11 693 mentions of "game" or "games"
  • 31 mentions of "nerd" or "nerds"
  • 8 mentions of "booth babes"

This afternoon I started and finished my web crawler to go through and download all the podcasts so I am now the unofficial historian and keeper of GWJ podcast history (except episodes 3 - 52 and 55 which I think rabbit had locally hosted and aren't available any more).

I found a slick solution using R to convert .mp3 files to .wav so I'm running that, using Python to talk to Google Cloud, and just fine tuning my topic modelling algorithm which is a lift a shift from a work project so hopefully will have some early results for the first 100 or so podcasts by end of week.

P.S. I have no classical training in coding (Bachelor in Chemical Engineering, Masters in Business Management) so if I'm not proof you can teach anyone to code, I don't know what more you need!

How many mentions of "Legion" though?

*Legion* wrote:

How many mentions of "Legion" though?

Legion? Omnipresent, of course.

*Legion* wrote:

How many mentions of "Legion" though?

Legion > Booth Babes
(12 mentions of Legion)

Your code must be buggy. No way am I losing to "nerds"!

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staygold wrote:

I'm working on a fun little project right now that I had exactly zero background on when I started, but I've learned quite a bit! I'm running all the GWJ Conference Calls through a Speech-to-Text pipeline to generate transcripts and then put those through an LDA topic model to see the evolution of the podcast and topics over time.

Figure out what percentage of words are "Like" and how it's changed over time.

-BEP

Nice project! I'm interested to see the results. It is something you could do a front page article for, I am sure the writers would be interested if you want to go that route.

Ok, I should know this, but my brain isn't providing me with answers.
I have a google sheet full of data that I need to turn into multiple sheets with data from the prime one.
What's the tool or method to go about this?
My brain jumps to python, but I'm hoping to do this all within the online google-verse if possible.
Is it Google Apps Script?

For your needs Apps Script could be appropriate. I found the limited tools available for developing with Apps Script a few years ago very constraining, but I was trying to update a company's financials that they were keeping in Google Sheets hooked together with secret Apps Script hobgoblins - I certainly do not recommend that use case.

If this is a repeatable need you would like to hand off to someone else - a new set of input Sheets arrives and a drone clicks a menu inside Sheets to make the magic happen - Apps Script can do that pretty well. If its a one-off that's just too complicated to handle with in-spreadsheet filters, my brain also defaults to Python.

Perfect for anyone that has done website programming: Web Development Merit Badges

Though many do work for any kind of development!

I made a miraculously simple, yet incredibly difficult to detect mistake while coding today.

I was writing a Python function to open a file and then save it as a pickle. Using an init file to load all the packages for the code and import function as f

However, later while looping through a bunch of text files and appending them to a dictionary I had used the temporary variable, f.open, thus overwriting my functions load and negating any future calls to f.

Lesson Learned: USE DESCRIPTIVE VARIABLE NAMES! Especially for temporary variables.

Not sure if this is the correct place to post but it seems close enough...

I begin a part-time distance learning Data Science degree with the Open University on Monday. Has anyone here studied Data Science and if so, what are things you wished you knew when you started out?

Thanks!

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This is cool. Source code to an unfinished sequel to Infocom's classic Hitchhiker's text adventure:

source repo

<OBJECT ZAPHOD
(LOC RAMP)
(DESC "Zaphod Beeblebrox")
(TEXT "Zaphod looks completely normal, except for his two heads.")

I feel like this is probably a better fit under "The Joys of NOT Programming", but I have a question for any of you who have made the transition to leadership.

I've been working as a tech lead the last couple of years and I've been asked to move into a role where I would lead other tech leads as well as take over some personnel management for the first time.

Anyone have good materials to recommend about making the transition from individual contributor to management?

DSGamer wrote:

Anyone have good materials to recommend about making the transition from individual contributor to management?

There are so many management books that come off as complete con jobs to me, but a few have been helpful:

The works of William Deming, staring with Out of Crisis. Most of his real life examples or hypotheticals are in the realm of manufacturing, but he's analyzing management at such abstraction that the principals map well.

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. The dude wanted to make Disney style animated movies, using computer graphics, in the seventies. So first he invented fundamental rendering technology we still use today, then pretty much made Pixar. Along the way he took impressively introspective and sociological notes on the nature of leadership, responsibility, decision making. The principal work being done here is creative, so some of his observations may not directly apply to programmers, but most broadly apply.

Both examples require some mapping to apply to programmers, but I've yet to come across any books regarding management that interfaces directly with software development. In my direct experience, good programmers take almost no direct management beyond communicating well defined technical goals comprehensively - but that's deceptively hard work! After that I think you just defend them from bureaucracy? "Don't make the programmers look up!"

If you used to hunt bugs, now you hunt miscommunication. You can tell people are miscommunicating when they are agreeing about something. They're actually speaking from different contexts without realizing it. Clarify that, and they can go back to harmonious disagreement.

That's all I got. Good luck DS, you're gonna do great. If it doesn't feel like it, remember, the bar is so very low.

DSGamer wrote:

Anyone have good materials to recommend about making the transition from individual contributor to management?

So in effort to find something more programmer/technical management specific, I have always liked the Rands in Repose blog. He collected some of the best articles into the Managing Humans book. He focuses a lot of how to do 1-1s, meetings and using comunication to try to avoid some of the big pitfalls. This piece of 1-1 archetypes is typical of his style. If you care about his CV, he's a Silicon Valley type, started at Borland, worked at Apple, was a VP at Slack, I think he's back at Apple.

Danjo Olivaw wrote:

Both examples require some mapping to apply to programmers, but I've yet to come across any books regarding management that interfaces directly with software development. In my direct experience, good programmers take almost no direct management beyond communicating well defined technical goals comprehensively - but that's deceptively hard work! After that I think you just defend them from bureaucracy? "Don't make the programmers look up!"

Totally. I think the main thing I'm worried about is the best way to keep track of what programmers know, how they're doing, etc. Right now I'm bouncing around between Evernote and other various note-taking applications. I'm wondering if there's anything better, tools or systems.

Danjo Olivaw wrote:

If you used to hunt bugs, now you hunt miscommunication. You can tell people are miscommunicating when they are agreeing about something. They're actually speaking from different contexts without realizing it. Clarify that, and they can go back to harmonious disagreement.

That's all I got. Good luck DS, you're gonna do great. If it doesn't feel like it, remember, the bar is so very low.

Thanks. I appreciate it. I'm really nervous, I have to admit. I've been working as a lead / architect for 2 years now, but this is a bigger jump, I feel.

DoveBrown wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

Anyone have good materials to recommend about making the transition from individual contributor to management?

So in effort to find something more programmer/technical management specific, I have always liked the Rands in Repose blog. He collected some of the best articles into the Managing Humans book. He focuses a lot of how to do 1-1s, meetings and using comunication to try to avoid some of the big pitfalls. This piece of 1-1 archetypes is typical of his style. If you care about his CV, he's a Silicon Valley type, started at Borland, worked at Apple, was a VP at Slack, I think he's back at Apple.

I'll check that out. Thanks.

boogle wrote:

this is ok

This looks like exactly what I was thinking of. Thanks. I'll give it a look.

Have you already checked out Manager Tools? They have a ton of good articles and podcasts and you can find some on the transition.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Have you already checked out Manager Tools? They have a ton of good articles and podcasts and you can find some on the transition.

Thanks. I'll check it out. Anything will help. I think I'm mostly nervous because even as a tech lead my work was very task oriented. Most of my career (I started working as a professional programmer 22 years ago) has been very task oriented. Make tickets progress from left to right, etc.

So thinking about goals like the career development of staff and the success of all projects is a bigger transition than any I've made before.

DoveBrown wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

Anyone have good materials to recommend about making the transition from individual contributor to management?

So in effort to find something more programmer/technical management specific, I have always liked the Rands in Repose blog. He collected some of the best articles into the Managing Humans book. He focuses a lot of how to do 1-1s, meetings and using comunication to try to avoid some of the big pitfalls. This piece of 1-1 archetypes is typical of his style. If you care about his CV, he's a Silicon Valley type, started at Borland, worked at Apple, was a VP at Slack, I think he's back at Apple.

I really like his blog and I even bought his book, Managing Humans, though I didn’t read it and don’t have it anymore.