brandi-studies

[brandi-studies]

Donation Request (URGENT)

So as you know my life has been very difficult this year. Info can be found on my blog under the tags “life updates” and “donations”. Basically: cut off from family due to them thinking I was faking mental illness (BPD, agoraphobia).

I am going back to uni next week, which means I won’t have much time to do the odd jobs and stuff that was keeping me afloat financially. 

Donate via PayPal Here

More info under the cut, including what I need the donations for, and what my job situation is.

Keep reading

[brandi-studies]

Holy heck. This was ... So helpful wow. I didn't know I needed this ty.

i really needed this today, so for anyone else who might

[brandi-studies]

July 15, 2017 It's Saturday, so that means I get to slow down, make a breakfast board, and watch Bob's Burgers before starting my day and tackling my to-do list.

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[brandi-studies]

July 12, 2017 I have a two hour break between classes, so I'm away from home for a good while. I was previously eating a granola bar or getting Dunkin' Donuts during my break ... but the granola bar was never filling and ya girl can't eat DD every day since I'm trying to eat healthier. So I started packing my lunch! (There's hummus in those tiny containers.)

[brandi-studies]

June 27, 2017 I wasn't expecting it to rain much while I was out, maybe a drizzle, nothing a raincoat can't handle. While I was waiting for the bus, though, it started pouring. This bus stop doesn't have any sort of covering, so I stood under a tree for shelter. Still ended up soaked with waterlogged shoes. My classroom was freezing and I wasn't any closer to being dry. I'm thankful that the lining of my backpack is water resistant, so my laptop is fine. As rough as my day started, I can't help but look around campus and admire how beautiful it is after the rain. I also picked up a nice hot latte to warm me up — a sentence never thought I'd say in the middle of a Florida summer. In my library nook until my next class. All is well.

[brandi-studies]

June 26, 2017 It's the first day of summer courses! My favorite thing about taking classes during the summer is the libraries on campus are almost empty so finding space to study or snagging one of the comfy lil individual nooks is never a problem.

[brandi-studies]

A little Valentine's Day doodle (... the Captain said I had I to).

[brandi-studies]

programming jobs

Infrastructure:

Sysadmin (managing, setting up, and keeping systems running)

Dev-ops (creating & using tools that devs use to manage systems)

Network Engineer (setting up, designing, and optimizing network infrastructures, TCP/IP, and other layers of the network stack)

Data Center Ops (they keep “the cloud” running)

Cable & Router Technicians (/r/cableporn)

Database Administrators (generally wizards)

Technical Support & Documentation (the incredibly tough bastards that actually deal with ghasp users)

Backend:

Full stack engineers (a little bit of everything)

Backend Application Development (rails, django, node, etc.)

Project Management (not always a technical technical role)

Engineering Management (usually former developers get promoted to this job)

Software Architects (planning out features before they are coded)

API Design (designing the interfaces between systems)

Security & Pentesting

Distributed System Architects (dealing with consistency, availability, partition tolerance, timing, of large, globally-separated systems)

Database Administrators (managing, maintaining, sharding, and migrating data stores, different from infrastructure-focused DBAs in that they are also writing backend code which interacts with the stores)

Frontend:

Full Stack (a little bit of everything, but focused primarily on the pieces that support a frontend)

UX/UI Front end designers (photoshop, indesign, sketch, html & css, etc. only)

General front end web development (html, css, and js)

Single-page app development (mostly with JS frameworks, e.g. angular or react)

Quality Assurance & Testing (writing tests, doing human tests, making sure things work)

Native:

iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, etc.

Consumer-facing Windows Desktop, OS X Desktop, Linux app development

Enterprise software development (large, made-to-order applications for businesses)

IT administration & admin software design (often very system-specific, hence the Native category)

Software Architecture (similar to backend architecture, designing features before they are coded)

Science and Theory:

Scientific Research (loads of Matlab, R, and ipython and more)

“Pure Compsci/Pure Math” Research (with haskell, lisp, lots more)

Scientific Software Development (e.g. protein folding software)

Data science (matlab, r, ipython, scikit-learn, etc.)

Machine Learning (e.g. for pagerank, reverse image search, beer recommendation, used all over the place now)

Compiler & Language Design (not many jobs but very useful to learn, maybe mozilla foundation & rust?, and Guido certainly gets paid by Dropbox :)

OS Design (not just microsoft, windows, & linux, also qualcomm and lots of other telecoms hire tens of thousands of engineers to write embedded and mobile OSs)

Compression (you can work for Hooli)

Marketing: This field has lots of overlap with data science.

Growth hacking/web scraping (selenium, beatifulsoup, phantomjs, scikit-learn, pattern, etc.)

Analytics (GA, mixpanel, optimizely etc. closely tied with marketing and SEO)

SEO & SEM (techniques to fuck with/obey search engines and convert $$ to visitors)

General Marketing Development (salesforce, analytics, content-design, and SEO)

Hardware and Graphics:

Embedded Software (code that runs very close to the metal, e.g. the assembly code running your elevator)

Chip Design & Architecture (wizards)

Game development (very, very different from other kinds of programmers, questionably human)

Graphics software development (similar to gaming dev, in my experience, graphics people don’t frequently switch to app dev or vice versa, I’d love to hear your comments)

3D printing and machining coding

CGI & Animation (e.g. disney. pixar devs gave a talk about the wonders of cgi development at Pycon2015)

f(rom reddit)

[brandi-studies]

me at school: when i get home im gonna be productive’

me at home: good nite 

[brandi-studies]

<March 01, 2016> My set up this afternoon is so cozy. It's warm and breezy, so I've opened my window and I'm sitting in bed, coffee perched on the windowsill. I'm trying a new plug-in scent, had it on the lowest setting for 30 minutes and my room is going to smell like Hawaiian Breeze all day and I'm loving it. (I'll eventually end up at my desk surrounded by pens and papers and it'll be a disaster so I'm enjoying this for the time being). Despite the perfect setup and how much work I need to do and how badly I want to do it, I'm having so much trouble actually getting started. I have to finish a paper, study for my oral exam in Spanish tomorrow, and study for my Data Structures & Algorithms midterm tomorrow (highest priority). Hopefully I can get focused soon.

[brandi-studies]

[02.16.2016] avo & egg toast + smoothie for lunch. Now it's time to work on the Computer Organization homework I've been procrastinating.

[brandi-studies]

Watch The Founder of Girls Who Code Perfectly School Trevor Noah On Why Culture Makes Or Breaks Women In Tech

On The Daily Show with Trevor Noah guest Reshma Saujani, an Indian-American lawyer and politician, discussed the initiative to encourage young women and girls to pursue studies and careers the booming tech field, where they are falling behind. But there are two moments in a girl’s life where we can reverse the trend.

Gifs: The Daily Show/cc.com

[brandi-studies]

Hashing

Hashing is a system that allow content to be stored in a way that can be codified thanks to some math, and is very useful for efficiently store data. Twitter, Tumblr and other social networks, and several pages and programs works internally with this system. This is the security key for making something secure enough or weak. The more you know!

Now, this is a happy easy example o hashing, with some cyberpunk movies as data examples.

First of all, we think of a blank table with numbered positions from 0 to n. It looks like this:

0[  ] 1[  ] 2[  ] … n[  ]

and continue with a content table, this case I’m using cyberpunk movies:

identification number[ Matrix ]  id number[ Blade Runner ] … id number […]

We need now a key number, this time we will choose n. now, we do this:

Matrix is the number 12, and the key is 11. The hash will be

h(12)= 12%11=1 (remember % returns the reminder of a division, not the ratio), so 12, which had the number position 0 in his content table, goes in the location 1 of the black table. We do the same with the rest contents. 

But shit may happen and the result of the h(m)= m%n may  be a location which is already chosen. For example, if the key is 5, we will encounter that 2 and 3 locations appear more than once. Then, we can have a couple of solutions. We use something called linked lists, and now each position can have a panel with 3 options. First, as the simple example before, the content. In the case of MATRIX, the content is 12. Secondly, the original location of MATRIX, which was as told before, 0. and, the third ones remains blank until another one want to be stored in the same position, and that third one will be used as a pointer for the next panel. It may sound confusing but take a look at this, it’s pretty easy, actually:

See? it’s very visual.

Finally, there’s another option. Let’s now imagine we want to add another 3 movies, with the numbers 55,23 and 60. Those have the result of 0,1 and 5 in the first system (n=11). instead of using the last method, we can try to find a new location until it fits. How?

h(55)= 55%11= 0 //ALREADY CHOSEN! SO…

h1(55)= (h(55)+ (2-1) %11)= (0+1)%11= 1%11= 1 //ALSO CHOSEN, NEXT

h2(55)= (h1(55)+(2-1) %11)=(1+1)%11= 2%11= 2//ONE MORE TIME

h3(55)= (2+1) % 11 = 3 %11= 3 //FREE!

so the movie with number 55 is stored in location 3. The same happens with the rest. Take a look:

And this is it, there’s way more about, but these are the basics, and I find it interesting. This system is being used in your computer all the time, every day, and you may don’t know it so!

[brandi-studies]

[02.04.2016] Took a break from working on my assignment from hell to go for a coffee run & my order number describes how I feel about it.

[brandi-studies]

20 Quick study Q and A's

1. Favourite time to study?

2. Coffee or tea?

3. Favourite writing pens?

4. Favourite highlighters?

5. Mind-maps or flash cards?

6. Music or not?

7. Why are you studying?

8. Who motivates you?

9. Are you proud of what you’ve accomplished so far this school year?

10. How much sleep do you get?

11. Your best tips for sitting exams?

12. Do you prefer to study alone or in a group?

13. If you could have the skills of one person who would it be?

14. Why is your favourite subject your favourite subject?

15. How do you tackle self doubt and/ or anxiety?

16. What puts you down the most and how do you recover from it?

17. Have you done something great today? What was it!

18. Do you find school difficult?

19. What is your ‘safe space’? (If you have one)

20. Lost five incredible things about yourself (even thou I’m sure there are far more)

[brandi-studies]

Reframing previous question:

Scenario: I’m a hypothetical new programmer. I’m on of those people who “sucks at math”. I hear about this cool new algorithms thing & look it up. I run into a bunch of MATH & give up in frustration

Me In Reality: I want to make a “Where do I go instead?” list for those people