For the past few months, I haven’t turned up any new articles. Partly due to laziness, partly because I’ve been on a journey of rediscovery. I call it rediscovery because I thought I had already trod the path of discovery. I thought I knew who I was, and who I wanted to be. But that […]
Category: Random
Some time ago, I found myself ruminating on a pertinent question; one I have asked myself multiple times. I’m pretty sure you might have asked yourself the same question if you’re a thinker like me. What do I really want in life? It’s interesting though. For many people, whenever this question pops up, they can’t […]
Category: Random
Quite recently, I started dabbling in Recommender Systems. My interest was piqued as a result of the pervasiveness of these systems in major technology platforms. Think of any site you use which offers suggestions to you based on your past activity: Amazon recommends books similar to ones you have liked and purchased; Netflix recommends movies […]
Category: Machine Learning
Anyone who has followed Nigerian music over the years can acknowledge it has come a long way. Once there was a time I didn’t fancy much of the jams our artists put out. I would label them as too loud or too fast, with inordinately shitty lyrics. But times have changed. I guess the current […]
Category: Random
The first note in this series gave an introduction to the K- Nearest Neighbour algorithm. In the note, I went ahead to point out some of the concerns around KNN. I also did a primer on concepts like Feature Scaling and Euclidean distances. In this note, we will be implementing a simple movie recommender system […]
Category: Machine Learning
Much of Machine Learning involves finding and exploring patterns in data. ML algorithms will typically learn patterns from training data and apply what is learned on new data. One algorithm deviates slightly from this method, however; instead choosing to discover patterns as it encounters new data. K Nearest Neighbours (KNN for short) is an algorithm […]
Category: Machine Learning
Throughout last week, I was unable to shake off an overarching feeling of dread. Usually, I’m not one to allow external circumstances to influence my mood. Life is hard. Shit happens. You can’t take many things to heart. But if you’re a Nigerian like me, then you probably followed the recent protests against police brutality […]
Category: Random
Java developers will agree that Java 8 felt like a huge paradigm shift from Java 7. Java 8 was released in March 2014, and most notably introduced functional programming concepts, lambdas, and the Streaming API. Functional Programming in Java was a huge win for a language that already had a reputation for being too imperative. […]
Category: Programming
About a few weeks ago, I was mindlessly scrolling twitter when I stumbled on a tweet by Vala Afshar. In the tweet, he mentioned that google came into operation in the late 90s, at a time when there were several search engines already in the market. The tweet also included a nostalgic video clip of […]
Category: Random
Although it’s very possible to code a typical Machine Learning algorithm from scratch, most times we wouldn’t want to do that. The reason is that there are already a bunch of libraries that have been built to solve the common problems you will encounter in the course of implementation. Hence, in practice, it’s always best […]
Category: Machine Learning