Day 23 Joins & Keys & Pytorch

This week has in some ways been a relief, but in other ways it’s been difficult. I expected the pace of Tech Elevator to remain steady once we ramped up, but that is not at all what I’ve been feeling. From my perspective, module 1 started off quite easy and ended with a lot of late nights finishing up my exercises and working with my partners. Now that we are in module 2, it feels like a similar pattern has begun. This is nice for the students who need to catch up on java exercises but I’m missing the fast pace.

Today we learned about primary keys and foreign keys. Then we learned about joining tables together on like keys in different tables. The first run through the lecture confused me but once we got into writing queries using joins, it made sense pretty quickly. We had pair and individual exercises for today but neither took very long to complete.

Not Tech Elevator:

In an effort to stimulate the learning muscles which at this point refuse to disengage, I spent my evening reading about reccurent neural networks: here and here. I also installed the python library for creating them, pytorch. In the second post above, Andrej trained his neural network on source code, Shakespeare, and markdown. In all cases the model was capable of learning to spell words, form proper grammar, and follow conventions of the training material. The source code didn’t compile, but it’s incredible how many coding conventions it learned properly.

Andrej provided some sample code which serves as good starting point to following in his footsteps. Well, I love reading but my reading list is massive and I make progress so slowly. I took some time to find some books I’d love to read online in epub format and downloaded them. I wrote a bash script to use calibre’s ebook converter ommandline tools to convert each one to a text file and then concatenate them into one input file. In addition to SQL this week, I’ll be trying to train a model of my own to possess the literary capacity I wish I had.

I have a developer account on Twitter so depending upon where this goes, I may try to automate my tweeting as a side project. . .