Articles & Thoughts

Deciphering Parking Signs with AI: A Prompt Engineering Use Case

June 14, 2024

In this blog post, we'll delve into the world of prompt engineering, a technique for communicating with AI models, and how it can be applied to the problem of interpreting parking signs. I'll share the prompt I crafted for my app, Can I Park, designed to extract relevant information from parking sign images and present it in a structured format.

KOTLIN

A Guide to Asynchronous Programming with Kotlin Coroutines Part 1

November 22, 2023

As a software developer, asynchronous programming is key to building efficient applications. This blog post goes over the core concepts of asynchronous programming, and how the Kotlin Coroutines library provides us with tools to simplify asynchronous programming in our applications.

ANDROID

Understanding Jetpack Compose Side Effects

November 5, 2023

Side Effects are a new tool in Jetpack Compose that allow us to handle application state In a composable-aware way. This article goes in depth about the different Side Effects and their use cases.

ANDROID

Publishing Your Android Library with Maven Publish and GitLab CI

June 12, 2023

This is a practical guide to publishing and maintaining an Android library project. Library projects are the true backbone Android app development. We all rely on them to speed up our development process. If you're looking for a guide to managing your own library project, hopefully this helps.

Neural Network Building Blocks

July 13, 2019

A top-level look at the components that make up a neural network. This details the components of an artificial neuron, the layers of a neural network, the process of feeding it data, and how "leaning" happens.

Giving Pointers a Go

December 14, 2017

This is an exploration into how pointers work in the Go programming language. It is a breakdown of what they are, the syntax of how they are used, and the appropriate use cases for them.

PYTHON

Algorithms With Python: Part 3 — Recursive Algorithms, Powers and Palindromes

November 8, 2017

Previously we covered search and sort algorithms. In this installment we will take a look at recursive algorithms. Recursion is a very useful technique for breaking down complex problems. It is the process of solving a problem by solving smaller instances of that problem, and then using that to solve the original problem. Basically, you continuously look for smaller instances of a problem until you hit the base case: where the problem is trivial to compute.

PYTHON

Algorithms With Python: Part 2 - Selection Sort and Insertion Sort

May 20, 2017

In our first installment of this series, we covered two common search algorithms. We saw that binary search has a much slower rate of growth than linear search, when it comes to an ordered list. Therefore, if we know we will be using binary search in our code, it would make sense for us to make sure whatever list we are searching is arranged in ascending or descending order. That is precisely what a sorting algorithm is for. In this post we will be looking at selection sort and insertion sort, and analyzing their performance.

PYTHON

Algorithms With Python: Part 1 - Intro, Linear Search and Binary Search

April 29, 2017

This is the beginning of a series on writing common computer science algorithms, with some brief analysis. I will be using Khan Academy’s course on algorithms as reference, and I will be implementing all the algorithms that are discussed in Python. In this post I will be tackling linear search and binary search.