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So, deep learning. Have you heard about it? If you work in the tech sector you probably have. Every week you see news about how people are using it to solve all sorts of interesting challenges around. Because of all the interest (and sometimes raw hype) around deep learning, you might believe that it’s some sort of revolutionary new technology....

This week’s article will be a bit shorter than usual. In the last month we discussed what I consider to be the most important topics on Pragmatic Learning and Thinking, by Andy Hunt. We discussed things like the Dreyfus Model, L-mode/R-mode brain operation modes, better ways of learning and common biases that affect our judgement. In this artic...

We tend to think of our brains as infallible logical machines with perfect memory and absolute rationality. We couldn’t be more wrong: it doesn’t matter how educated or intelligent we are, there are inherent flaws in our brains we just can’t get rid of. This has nothing to do with your preparation or ability for rational thinking, usually, it’s...

You can run Rails Jobs without having to configure any backend. The only things you need are the Rails console and the perform_now method. Suppose you created a job called PrintHappy: rails generate job print_happy You can navigate to the app/jobs folder and populate the perform method with anything you need: class PrintHappyJob < Applic...

Learning is an important activity in almost any context. We humans need to acquire new knowledge and skills to face the challenges we find in our lives, no matter where we live or what we do. This is especially true for knowledge workers like engineers or software developers. The work we produce is very often intangible: a piece software or a b...

In the previous article, we discussed two different brain operation modes. While not a literal representation of what’s going on in our brain, it’s still a useful tool when thinking about how our brain processes things. On one hand, we have L-mode: linear, logical, abstract and in charge of verbal and symbolic representation of knowledge. On th...

It’s possible to use multiple RSpec change matchers with a single block of code. The only thing you need is to use the and keyword to link them. The general form is something like this: expect{ action_that_produces_change }.to change(...) .and change(...) ... .and change(...) Let’s see how this can help us usin...

In the previous article of this series, we discussed the Dreyfus model, an abstraction that lets you understand the progression we humans go through when learning a new skill. In this article, we will discuss another useful model. In this case, the subject is our own amazing brain. Have you ever faced a very tough problem and spent hours trying...