Productive procrastination for coders — November 2017 Issue
Things to check out while not coding
Procrastination is a vital part of any development process, it can:
- Refuel your willpower
- Let divergent ideas come to the table
- Make you call to your Bubbe more often
- And so much more
But you need to do it right! As an experienced procrastinator, I read, watch and listen to so many things that are far as much as they can be from my current working process.
I usually share these with my close friends (never procrastinate alone) and now, in this first article, you can too!
These are the best things I wasted my time on this month — Have fun
Thomas Diewald: Particle pathfinding:
Thomas is a “processing developer” (I think that’s a proper title). He builds visually stunning demos, experimenting with different shaders and visual computation algorithms. Here are some examples:
He writes about his work on his site (link in the title above).
Adrian Kosmaczewski: Being A Developer After 40:
This lecture is mature, light, fun and full of wisdom!
Can be useful for anyone over or under 40.
If you prefer you can go through the written lecture of the video above:
Simon Gladman: Advanced Image Processing with Core Image
In his talk, Simon explains about his open source project Filterpedia (that he built for his book Core Image for Swift):
I reached this talk after getting a request from a client to write a new type of filter. Before going all in with Metal or OpenGL, I thought it might be useful to experiment with the filters that exist on the iOS platform (more than 170 of them).
Simon built an app that lets you experiment with these filters!
I also needed something a little different — I needed a tool that could chain filters one after the other, so we could compose new filters using the existing ones.
With the help of Simon’s talk and a quick hackathon over the weekend I’ve managed to build a POC of that app:
Let me know what you think 😉
Wisecrack analyses of South Park S2107: “Doubling Down”:
This is probably the best episode in the session (so far)!
Warning: Spoilers!
CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition
This is Spring 2017 free online course from Stanford. I finished the third lesson and so far this course is amazing!
It’s a follow up of Andrew NG course: CS229: Machine Learning that you can find for free on Coursera. I think you can skip this course and go straight to CS229.
PodCast: Two Nice Jewish Boys, Episode 63 — Candies from Heaven: Tales of a Jerusalem Boy
I reached this specific episode because I like Gil Hovav. He is a television presenter, journalist, restaurant critic, author of cookbooks and a writer. He is the descendant of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, “The reviver of the Hebrew language”, and maybe just mostly known as a foodie.
In this great fun interview, Gil speaks about his childhood, growing in old Jerusalem, coming from a mixed culture family and of course, food.
Late to the party — I joined Twitter @hershalle:
In Israel, my birth country and where I currently live, Twitter is not that popular so I didn’t spend much time there. But recently I’ve noticed more and more of my developer friends are active there and so, in a classic case of FOMO, I decided to join all of them! And here is what I think about it so far:
Twitter is amazing! It’s a social network where people share everything, not just the good parts (like Facebook or Instagram). And there’s so much good content for developers!
That’s it for the first issue! let me know what you think in the comments.
See you on the next one.
