Sean is Coding #4: Hack or Snooze
Adventures in AI, algorithms, and HTTP requests!
Contents
Progress Report
Bug Report
Surf Report
BONUS: Midjourney Report (with Prompts!)
Progress Report
Wrapped up week 2 of Rithm, where we spent time getting familiar with HTTP requests passing data back and forth between the front-end and the backend.
The week concluded with a fun two-day sprint where we paired off and built the front-end for a Hacker News clone called “Hack or Snooze.”
I think the most valuable part of it all for me was learning how to work with someone else on such a relatively large codebase, where it matters where functions are implemented and how they’re scoped.
In the evening hours, I also started working through Colt Steele’s excellent Algorithms and Data Structures Masterclass I’d purchased back in December. I feel like Rithm is doing a great job getting me used to how programming works in the real world. This course is more of a deep dive into designing and working with some of the more complex data structures you tend to encounter in interview questions.
This weekend: Our weekend assessment this week is building a Jeopardy clone that gets questions from a generic trivia API and organizes them into categories.
Next week: Starting Monday we switch to Python and start building servers in Flask. Super excited as I’ve got a lot to learn in this area.
Bug Report
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra
... and this week, we put in (and subsequently took out!) a lot of bugs.
The Hack or Snooze project followed an object-oriented pattern, where data and functionality were managed together in classes that represented different entities relevant to the app (e.g. users, stories, etc.). We had a lot of functions that passed the data in these objects back and forth between the server resulting in a variety of tricky TypeErrors that ultimately had to do with the format of data as it passes between servers and clients.
One tricky fact of working with server requests is properly manipulating and acting on the data that they send back. Servers can only send strings back to the client. It’s usually JSON-formatted and it’s often nested in a larger data structure containing response headers and other information about the server response.
Here’s what one of our server responses might look like:
If you look inside that data field, you see the data we’re looking for, but it’s still not an instance so we can’t run any of our instance methods on it:
So we ultimately needed to instantiate instances of each story object as they were recalled from the server. We used a JS library called Axios for the request, but the same can be done using the fetch() API:
Surf Report
BONUS: Midjourney Report
I’ve been playing around with Midjourney in my spare time and have started experimenting with some of the “pro-level” prompts you might be seeing more and more of from prompt engineering influencers. Here’s a hilarious meme from one of those influencers that I think effectively captures the sea change we’re seeing in AI-generated art:
Here are some of my favorite creations from this week:
Cyborg Baby
cyborg baby| with a visible detailed brain| muscles cable wires| detailed cyberpunk background with neon lights| biopunk| cybernetic| unreal engine| CGI | ultra detailed| 4k
Meditations
anime style wizard floating over pond in Meditation peaceful silence --niji --q 2
Wormhole
wormhole into a parallel universe ultra detailed celestial high resolution 16:9 cinematic photorealistic --chaos 100 --q 2
Post-Apocalyptic SF Future
san francisco skyline in the high tech future::3 photorealistic::5 realistic::3 sunlight::3 DSLR::2 panorama::2.5 wide angle lens::2 satellite imagery::1.5 --ar 2:1 --v 4 --quality 2 --stylize 1000 --chaos 100
Asian Battle Queen
ancient chinese queen::2 ultra modern::1 natural lighting::2 glowing::3 fluorescent::2 DSLR::1 wide angle lens::1 defocus::-0.5 --ar 2:1 --v 4 --quality 2
