When I started my first Java job, I was immediately overwhelmed by my knowledge gaps of the Java ecosystem. I knew how to write decent code and had a good understanding of the Java language, but I had never used…
Review: edX Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence has always been something that has interested me, but more in the “I can beat you at chess” sense than the Data from Star Trek sense. Perhaps because the former seems like something I can reasonably design whereas…
Review: Coursera Functional Programming Principles in Scala
Functional programming is one of those generic “scary” programming phrases like “concurrency” or “cryptography.” We know it’s probably useful, but we can usually get by without it. While I vaguely knew a little about Haskell, I wasn’t really sure what…
Review: Coursera Machine Learning
Although not as much of a buzzword as “Big Data”, “Machine Learning” is definitely en vogue. To be honest, the phrase sounds much more exotic than the actual technique! Nonetheless, the area of artificial intelligence interests me so I decided…
Creating Voronoi Diagrams with ggplot
A Voronoi diagram (or tessellation) is neat way of visualizing spatial data. It essentially allows us to see the areas that are closest to a set of locations. For example, this map shows all of the Criagslist localities and the…