January 2020 - overview

It has been a quite varied month.

• I attended two coding meetups:

  • New Year’s Hyperledger @ PwC More London

  • IBM Code London - Audio Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks @ Techspace Shoreditch

• I built a blockchain using Python, more on that here

• I’ve been getting to grips with some WARC tools, more on that here

• I completed the freeCodeCamp JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures certification

The Hyperledger meetup touched on enterprise usage of Hyperledger blockchains and their use in finance, supply chains, and healthcare etc. There was a demo of a blockchain application from KompiTech - who also provide a free blockchain development toolkit.

The IBM Code London meetup was on the topic of “Audio Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks”. A large part of the meetup involved working through a Python workbook using the IBM Cloud platform. We trained a neural network to recognise the voices of a couple of American chatshow hosts (Stephen Colbert and Conan O’Brien). The Github page for the meetup is here.

I managed to complete the freeCodeCamp JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures certification - it was a lot harder than the previous certification though it took less time to complete.

I haven’t made much progress regarding “The great 2020 plan” - though I have started reading The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Hoffman, 1998).