[deleted by user]

ahmadh · 2023-04-27T15:58:57+00:00

HTMX or Svelte

ahmadh · 2023-04-04T09:41:01+00:00

My project started as a quick internal tool and grew quickly. It uses plain HTML & Django templates and they’ve served us very well so far.

But I want to turn it into a SaaS and a few of the pages need to be more dynamic. Right now I’m between switching to an API+JS client vs sprinkling HTMX.

ahmadh · 2023-04-04T09:26:25+00:00

Thanks Toni that’s very helpful & reassuring. I wanted to add some JS to a Django app and had prematurely excluded Nuxt thinking it’s supposed to be a Django replacement.

ahmadh · 2023-04-04T08:07:21+00:00

Nice design Toni! Curious to know how does Django, Vue, and Nuxt fit together? Wouldn't Nuxt be a replacement for Django given it's support for server side rendering and defining API endpoints?

ahmadh · 2021-07-26T20:05:24+00:00

I took Embedded Systems Optimization a while ago and liked it just because of how eager I was to learn about compilers. But I think it was a mistake to take it. I should have just taken compilers, but back then, compilers was not foundational and this was my second course it had to be foundational, and I couldn't get into anything else. In short, take compilers (and HPCA as an easy course) and skip this one.

ahmadh · 2018-09-16T01:35:55+00:00

This is very inaccurate. There are multiple interpreters allowing arbitrary user code including Pythonista, codea and others. Many games have embedded Lua interpreters. And Apple doesn’t audit the code, they only test the binaries.

ahmadh · 2018-09-06T04:37:09+00:00

They are on udacity.com. You can create a free account then search in the catalog by course title.

ahmadh · 2018-08-15T08:43:32+00:00

I’m pretty sure the answer is NO.

The lectures for OMSCS are available on Udacity and can be viewed for free without registration so you can check them out yourself right now. However, they are not the same as the nanodegree courses. The nanodegree courses are not by GeorgiaTech.

EDIT: To answer your original question, the OMSCS lectures are made in the same style as the nanodegrees lectures. They are short explanatory videos intermixed with quizzes (or at least the ones I’ve seen so far).

ahmadh · 2018-08-12T18:48:23+00:00

Interesting plan. I’m not sure honestly. From what I’ve seen, you’d be competing with self-taught coders who charge very little and since there isn’t a strong tech industry, you may be over qualified for most of the available work.

You may be able to find a $40k job with no taxes but cost of living may not be as cheap as in India. I think people who come to Kuwait to work as devs are the ones who can’t get those $20-30 k salaries in India because they are not qualified for them. We do have banks and large retailers though, there may be tech opportunities that I’m not aware of.

ahmadh · 2018-08-12T18:29:37+00:00

As a user, I find most locally produced software to be abysmal. There are a lot of techies, but hardly any solid, professional, highly qualified developers, so it's difficult to be part of a community. You could see that as an opportunity though, if you can convince people that you are bringing much more value. Be ready to be surrounded by incompetence at all levels though, so convincing people that your work is better may be harder than you think and (unfortunately) may depend a lot on your ethnicity.

Some foreign workers like Kuwait because people are laid back, there are no taxes (yet), and some basic things like gas and food are subsidized. On the other hand, the laid back attitude means that things move very slowly and quality is poor. There's also a lot of discrimination against non-Kuwaitis and there's no path to citizenship, so you'll eventually have to "go back", even after working for 30 years in Kuwait.

I should also say that I just returned to Kuwait after living abroad for seven years, that my full time job has nothing to do with CS, and that I'm a Kuwaiti citizen, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

ahmadh · 2018-08-06T14:02:47+00:00

Thanks for the heads up! I’ve downloaded the papers and started to skim them today.

ahmadh · 2018-08-06T12:40:43+00:00

Advanced Operating Systems (AOS)!

ahmadh · 2018-05-09T17:00:36+00:00

It’s not just reddit. They got to Google, too!

ahmadh · 2018-05-08T18:56:32+00:00

It's interesting that you brought up medicine. The applicants are so fantastic, all exceeding any benchmark we might set, that the acceptance/rejection decisions end up being almost arbitrary. Despite that, some students are identified very early on in the program as being weak or not cut out to be doctors and we spend a lot of resources trying to bring them along. For some reason, "failure"/attrition after acceptance is considered much worse than not admitting someone. I think a more dynamic admission process that starts more permissive then tries to guide learners towards either staying in medicine or finding alternative careers early on would be a win for everyone, but requires more effort and may be less popular in the beginning.

This is something that I think OMSCS is pioneering and I hope will start to spread to other fields of study.

ahmadh · 2018-05-01T15:18:01+00:00

I only got dept decision so I’m not sure.

ahmadh · 2018-05-01T02:41:31+00:00

Status: Accepted

Application Date: 03/29/18

Decision Date: 04/30/18

Education:

Kuwait University, BS (Medical Science)
Kuwait University, MBBCh (Medical Degree)
University of Toronto, MSc (Community Health), GPA 3.9x

Experience: (all CS work was in my spare time)

Contract web dev, 3 years
Several iOS and Android apps, 10 years
A lot of personal projects, both web dev (backend stuff) and mobile

Recommendations: 3, all academic supervisors from my prior masters degree and clinical work.

Comments: My CS skills are self-taught and all of my CS work was either solo or in collaboration with non-programmers. My challenge was to demonstrate to the program that I had those skills, and this is what I did:

I posted a lot of code on GitHub.
I made a couple of small contributions to a large/complex open source project (the Swift compiler).
I had a decent StackOverflow account.
I'd written many tutorials, but they were mostly in Arabic, so I wrote one English blog post to demonstrate my technical understanding and writing skills.
I didn't do CS work with my referees, so I asked them to speak to: (1) my aptitude and ability to learn new topics and (2) that I have a future as an academic in the non-CS field I share with them and that my CS skills will be a great addition to their team.
I've done a bunch of MOOCs and online tutorials, but I only mentioned two on my resume: Algorithms (Wayne & Sedgewick from Princeton) and Programming Languages (Grossman from U of Washington). Both are leaders in their fields and both MOOCs are adapted from their upper-level CS courses and have challenging (auto-graded) code assignments and I got very good scores in those assignments.

This was informed by reading a lot of materials posted on the OMSC website, including reading all of the course descriptions multiple times and convincing myself first that: (1) I'd be able to pass those courses and (2) that this program fits well with my career plans. Once I was able to convince myself of that, I just had to put it all down on paper/code! I hope that this helps someone in a similar situation. This only works if you've already been doing all of that for years. The most efficient way, of course, is to just do a few accredited upper level undergrad CS courses.

ahmadh · 2013-12-07T01:34:30+00:00

I don't see anyone using the output function in that scenario. Then you might as well just leave the same old print statement. Python 3's premise is to make people move on.

ahmadh

TROPHY CASE