An inexhaustive list of things I’ve done during my retreat at the Recurse Center: (explanatory links will be added when summary posts are finished)

• Worked on the Instacart Market Basket Analysis competition (1577th place at 0.3772453; max score 0.4091449)
• Did some introductory exercises with javascript coding and syntax on Freecodecamp
• Tried to implement a way to call the pavlok API to shock a user according to vents in a PICO-8 console through a javascript bridge
• Wrote three PICO-8 games:
  • Quantum trouncer, a (yet unfinished) maze in reciprocal space
  • Spaceball, an arkanoid where your paddle is confined to a circle and blocks appear in the middle
  • An implementation of the Langton’s Ant cellular automata
• A twitter bot and Lua script based approach (similar to this one with Twilio) to enable game genie codes in Super Mario Bros. in FCEUX via tweet, using Levenshtein distance and a lookup table
• Learned about Visidata, an incredibly powerful tool that I’ve incorporated into my daily workflow
• A lot of boring but necessary progress in SQL skills
• A lot of less-boring but extremely welcome progress in vim skills
• Paired with Hang Lu Su on a twitter bot for social good 🙂
• Paired on an image
• Wrote and presented a 45-minute introductory presentation to machine learning for beginners, available here
• Forked and modified a twitter-archival script or the purpose of downloading .png screenshot images of a user’s entire timeline (not RTs, though), available here
• Several days worth of interview practice and basic algorithms and data structures refreshers — lots of hackerrank
• Workshops on testing- what it is and how to use (mostly Python) libaries like Hypothesis and pytest.
• Refucktoring! This was a really fun exercise where a group of people took running code and made it worse by obfuscating things while still ensuring that tests pass. Here’s my version of a Lua script that translates between integers and Roman numerals
• A little bit of reinforcement learning with FCEUX using the setup described here
• Refactored my pyedgeon code, and created an instagram bot based on it (really, in present form, a python script that can post via terminal)
• Worked on some data science take-home interview questions and compiled a repo for my answers
• Facilitated feelings check-in for the second 6-week span of my batch
• Clicked through several ipython notebooks about adversarial machine learning (cleverhans library)
• Made a very simple django website using the djangogirls docs
• Did a lot of studying statistics
• Did a few extremely basic Haskell and Elm tutorials; didn’t really get it
• Used TileMill to create a map of projected sea level rise in NYC over the next century (but never published it)
• Re-hashed my resume and created a jobs profile on the RC website
• Wrote Web Scrapers to obtain large numbers of press releases to help one of Paul Gowder’s projects: pressreleasepoint, cbs news, fox news
• Generally, did a lot of talking to really amazing bright people