Hello World - Day 1 on the road to Learning to Code

I distinctly remember my first experience with code in a University setting, some barbarian at the front of the lecture hall was telling the class to write the code to "print" Hello World - The irony being he wanted us to do it with pen and paper.

Hello World - hello Java.
You see, up until then, all of my previous experience with coding was through building websites. HTML and CSS, two of the most popular languages. They are fun languages. The way this guy taught Java though, was like pulling keys from a mechanical keyboard one-by-one, that feeling of never knowing when it's going to let go, if it will go flying off, or if it broke and you're one switch down. They never include extra switches. - Did I get that right? The feeling... I'm trying here, bear with me.

Later on, I got exposure to Maple through another class I did not enjoy, then through working in the Physics Labs I started learning C++ and VBA, these two were far more interesting than anything I'd seen before. Did you know you can model things and analyze things and do all sorts of neat programming with these two? Words ring out from my past, joined with memories from those times, like eigenvectors, eigenvalues, probability, matrix...

~ Pseudo-Related: Understanding Binary Black Holes and How Scientists Prove Einstein was Right.

Then, out in the real world, where people care about Money ($), I saw business as a problem that can be solved. There are solutions available, non-trivial I assure you. Applying Scientific principles lead to repeated successes, each time leveraging something already known, for that which was unknown. That one extra edge further than your competition, it's what makes you solve problems while you sleep. It's where I learned to call the spreadsheets of Excel my home-base.

Constructing algorithm after algorithm, following the continuous improvement methodology. Testing, building, validating, and improving functionality for years on tools that are all designed to tell you something interesting about your business, customers, users - whatever. You can get completely carried away with Microsoft Excel, there is no limit to what you can do with Excel. Except, if you want to look at data with more than 1,048,576 rows or 16,384 columns, then you need more Power. Get it?... Power-pivot... probably not. - It's always felt like a stepping stone though, for when you want more control, access and power to manipulate large data sets, you start exploring the universe of SQL, servers, relational databases. That's when you start to see things as the structures of relationships between sets of tables, or data sets of information. Suddenly life becomes all about querying db's and looking for ways to decrease machine load times. 

Hardware and servers start to appear very attractive, how many cores, how much ram, peta level NAS arrays with SFP+ fiber interconnect, I started to wonder about leveraging the power of GPUs in SLI or Crossfire for Artificial Intelligence programming.

Explore this Parallel: Learning to Mine Crypto-Currency, Ethereum, ETH.

I heard Artificial Intelligence is going to take all our jobs, and change everything about the future. I also heard influential people express fear about it, maybe it's not understood. I think, it's time to progress, move on to the next step, I think I need to learn to code and solve more advanced problems using AI. Considering I'll be starting at a relatively basic level, I've always enjoyed trying to demonstrate what I'm learning to others as a way of validating my own knowledge and experience. As well it creates a resource that others hoping to learn to code Artificial Intelligence might find helpful too.

The Next Steps: Getting Started with the Basics of Setting up a Machine Learning Environemnt.

And so, I'm on my way to learn new code,

And, so should you.