Advent of Code 2021 is about to start on December 1.

I recently converted a number of websites over to using Let’s Encrypt for SSL certificates, and the process was much easier than I expected.

I’ve come across the Fourier Transform a number of times, but I don’t think I ever developed a good intuition for what was going on. The following 3Blue1Brown video does a great job of providing that intuition.

One of Haskell’s features that I really liked was list comprehensions, so I was very pleased to discover how nice Julia’s comprehensions are!

This instructional movie from 1937 explains how a car’s differential gears work (to allow the driving wheels to turn at different speeds when cornering) in very easy to understand way! Modern tutorials could learn a lot from this.

A friend sent me the following videos that I found beautiful from a math & physics perspective.

I’ve been using wkhtmltopdf in Rails projects for years. After upgrading to Rails 6 and Ruby 2.6, PDF creation started failing for me. This post documents what I did to get it to work again.

Advent of Code 2020

Some Racketeers mentioned the Advent of Code 2020, and I thought it would be fun to give it a shot this year. I’ll be discussing my solution to Day 1 Part 2, so if you haven’t completed it yet, you may want to hold off on reading further.

I added a advent-of-code–2020 directory within my LearningRacket repository where I’ll be adding my solutions.

Someone on the Julia Slack mentioned this interview with Peter Norvig on the Gradient Dissent podcast.

• The 4th edition of Peter’s book, “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” was released earlier this year.

• When asked, “Do you think that Python will continue to be the main programming language for ML for the next decade?”, Peter replied, “Looking at where we are today, I guess I would be happier if Julia was the main language” ! (40:34)

I occasionally compile some statistics on programming language popularity by running a bunch of Google searches to rank programming languages according to the number of results. I wouldn’t read too much into these stats, but they are not without value.

This time, I’ve included the code I use (written in Racket) and the raw data.

I made the following Google searches and summed the results:

"implemented in <lang>"
"written in <lang>"
"developed in <lang>"
"programmed in <lang>"