New project, new hobbies, new motivation! (November 2018)
This month has been pretty productive for me.
I finally sent my maths work to school (nearly half of the program) and I’m going to have exam soon. I started new project, came back to some courses and picked up new hobby. Ohh and I started reading “Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin which leads me to the conclusion I should fix some things in my new project before adding new features.
Guitar & piano
As you probably guessed from article image, I started playing guitar. I decided I’m gonna give it a try. It’s about a week now and I can play E, D and A (kinda A) chords with relatively quick switching. I like it quite a lot!
I also came back to playing piano (I had piano lessons and attended musical school when I was a kid). I’m learning about blue scales and things like that as I’d like to play jazz.
Syl
I was struggling to come up with something interesting to code which could also teach me some stuff strictly related to the stack I’m using. On the other hand I didn’t want to do another “quick app” just to see what new library/framework can offer. Then idea of something like Atena from Overwatch or Jarvis from Avengers popped up in my head.
And that’s basically how Syl was born.
It’s not AI, but rather something imitating it. You can read more about it in the documentation I created so far. General idea is a robot running on Raspberry Pi interacting with me and recognising some keywords/sentences and responding to them. So if I say, e.g. “play Good Parts” it searches for track named “Good Parts” and plays it, or when I want to set an alarm for tomorrow let’s say 7am I just need to say “Syl, set alarm for tomorrow 7am”. That’s the general idea and both of these features are not implemented yet. I’m currently working on the core of recognising mechanism and cleaning code. When I’m done with it I’ll start developing the main version (for Raspberry Pi) since the one I just shown you is a browser version which is going to also have a chat (kinda something like cleverbot).
Why Syl?
I’m a big fan of fantasy books. Good fantasy books. One of my favourites if not the favourite series is “Stormlight Archieve” written by Brandon Sanderson. My original plan was to name bot Jackie, it sounds like Jack. (Captain) Jack Sparrow from “Pirates of Caribbeans” which is my favourite movie series (equally with “Lord of The Rings”).
And then I realised why all these bots have female names (apart from Mark Zuckerberg’s Jarvis, he has custom voice). Basically every voice I used so far from Web Speech API is female. So I decided to pick female name from one of the books I read, and then I came up with Syl which is also very short! (her full name is actually Sylpherina but it’s said only one time in the whole series [so far]). Alright, you better read these books yourself if you like this genre, I’m not gonna spoil anything.
Autumn can be sad
If I would have to choose one season of the year I like the least it would probably be Autumn, even though my birthday are in October. It’s getting cold, days are really short, many grey and rainy days… Yeah, it doesn’t sound as good as Summer or even Winter. And it leads to some worse days when you wake up later than you should and don’t feel like doing anything. And after a whole day you feel burned out and kinda sad. It happens to me every Autumn, you can feel this slow lazy grey mood in the air.
However after those dark wet grumpy days there is always sun! (eventually if not on the next day, maybe after 3 days or next week) And that’s something positive you should stick with. Yeah, it definitely feels like the right way to end this article.
Have a nice one!
