Let’s dive into code!

I love screencasts! Screencasts are an easy and fun way to learn new technologies. If you want to avoid fluff, dive directly into code… screencasts are one of the best tools to achieve it!

I was impressed with a great work done by Geoffrey Grosenbach from PeepCode or guys like Bill Dudney or Ryan Bates who publish their recordings under Pragmatic Programmer umbrella. I have bought almost all material they have produced and it was money well spent.

After watching a few of their episodes I understood I would love to follow into their footsteps and start to produce my own screencasts. A few months later, working after hours I finished my online store and recorded Stripes fundamentals.

It is the first out of a series of screencasts that map out how to use Stripes to solve everyday web application development challenges in a simple and efficient way. The whole series is based on application-centric approach where the development of an online shop application drives the coverage of Stripes.

At code quest I don’t want to focus only on one domain or technology. The upcoming screencast will be dedicated to deployment on Ubuntu. I am recording it together with my friend Piotr Maj and it should be available by the end of May. Please stay tuned!

I hope screencasts published at code quest will help developers learn in a fast and efficient way. My goal is to produce high quality stuff at a reasonable price. And my hope is that you’ll help me achieve this goal. It is an agile project and you get to help steer.

I look forward to your feedback.

What is omnimemo?

More and more friends ask me what I would like to achieve with omnimemo? What kind of application I am building? What is omnimemo?

Well… to make the long story short, omnimemo is a service for people who would like to build rock-solid knowledge in a fast and efficient way.

I would like to implement application that will assist learner in his or her learning process.

It will learn how user learns. By building approximated model of user learning curve, omnimemo will compute optimum intervals between repetitions.

There are many factors that can be used to build model of learning curve and compute those intervals but in the first version of omnimemo I will focus on two main contradictory features.

• in the period of time frequency of repetitions should be as low as possible. The reason for that is that longer time between repetitions of certain material produces stronger association in the brain. This is so called spacing effect.
• … but students shouldn’t forget material before repetition, it means intervals between repetitions should be short enough to ensure that the knowledge is still remembered.

In the future versions of omnimemo I would like to combine local features specific to user learning process with the global features of the whole group of learners who try to master given pice of knowledge.

There is several algorithms and methods to choose from and experiment with. It will be interesting!

Apart from approximated model of user learning curve there are two more aspects that are equally important for me in the context of omnimemo.

First of all, I would like to embed in the omnimemo social aspect of learning process. I would like users to be able to share with their friends material they would like to master and enjoy spirit of collaborative learning. I remember when I was student that I had really good results when I studied with the group of my friends. We shared notes, materials and studied together. It was fun and effective!

Secondly, I would like to make it possible to learn almost everywhere. I would like to build version of omnimemo for mobile devices.

I definitely need version for my iPhone but I will also build version for Android because I like an idea behind this platform and would like to take this opportunity to master it while building sth useful.

There is still a lot of work in front of me but I strongly believe I can build sth that matters and brings value.

Snipetag, online game with the purpose

Imagine an ideal world where humans solve some problems and computers solve other problems. …and they both live in harmony. Does it sounds like Matrix? Maybe, but I think it is one of the directions in which web applications will evolve in the near future.

Technology develops and improves with the speed of light. Each year more and more research is done in the area of artificial intelligence, computer vision or pattern recognition. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of tasks that computers cannot solve yet and there is a huge need for human processing power.

Humans can identify objects in a photo or video much more effectively than computers. Humans can transcribe and translate podcasts, identify emotions, fill in questionnaires on a variety of topics. Still only humans can write valuable reviews and blog posts. Machines are not intelligent enough. At least not now.

A few months ago, inspired by work of Luis Van Ahn, I decided to build a game where as people play and have fun they help to solve one of the current challenges in the area of computer vision and content based information retrieval. They help to build a better world.

Snipetag is game with the purpose! The goal of the game is to retrieve semantics from images and gather data they will contribute to the research in the area of machine recognition of objects in the web of photos. All data will be available for free to any researcher whose work, research could benefit from it.

Don’t forget the most important thing! Each game you play helps a small, friendly alien lost on the Earth. Here is the story of Thomaso Marsjano.

Have fun and help to build a better world!

Ahhh… I build this application after hours, so please forgive me bugs. If you find an issue that has to be fixed please don’t hesitate to send me an email. I will fix it. Snipetag is one of my experiments and is now in BETA mode.

Each travel has its own beginning…

My strong belief is that travelling is more about experiences rather that sights. For me, travel is a process of transformation. If the trip shook your ideas up, if the experience changed you, then the journey was a success.

One of my travels had its beginning a few months ago. I shared an idea with my friend of building a web site where people could describe their travel experience in an intuitive and pleasant way, publish photos as well as keep track of their friends’ journeys and find out more about destinations before booking a trip.

The idea has caught up. Together with the small team of close friends we decided to invest our time and energy. We started a preparation for our first entrepreneurial travel!

For all of us it has been a new experience. What will be our final destination? What kind of obstacles will we encounter on our way? We still don’t know. The final destination is not the most important thing. What is really significant is new experience we all gain!

Real travel involves meeting people whose viewpoints are completely different from your own, finding out that you still have a lot in common, that you can communicate and learn a lot from one another. From this point of view work on the natrasie.pl is real travel.

natrasie.pl is built by friends and for friends. We hope that our passion and engagement will help us to organize valuable and interesting place on the Internet for our users.

I invite you to visit our website… and please share your experience. Psss… please forgive us bugs, we are in beta mode now.