Geeky Gal Technical Musings

I'm a Swift Newbie. And its humbling to say the least. But I'm definitely seeing parallels with other object oriented programming languages such as Java. One prime example is the Optional type. optionals were recently introduced to  the Java development ecosystem (JDK8) But as any Java developer would know, third party libraries such as Guava supported the optional type way before Java 8 was a thing. Guava, anyone? No, not the fruit. Check this out  for more on Guava optionals specifics. The resource also highlights some common regrets with nulls in general. In a nutshell, they suck! (thanks Doug Lea for the quote!) In short, optionals give us the option (see what I just did there) to store an existing value of a specific type or nothing at all. For example, let's say we want a variable to hold someone's middle name. Not everyone has a middle name so we want to allow the possibility of a missing value. So I want a variable called middleName to hold a person's mi

So one of my takeaways from last weekend's Women Techmaker Summit 2017 was this great resource on neutral networks and deep learning - Neural Networks and Deep Learning . Machine learning, big data and artificial intelligence are hot topics currently in the technology world. There are a lot of online and offline resources out there. What I most like about neutral networks and deep learning is that its a free online book and accessible to anyone  with a computer and Internet access (free is almost always a good thing!) the conversational writing style of the author Michael Nielsen Nielsen's philosophy to build on the core concepts and theory rather than become a Jack or Jill of all trades and learn some long list of concepts. He wants the reader to build and develop a solid (and deep) understanding of key concepts. I love the analogy he keeps in the introduction on learning the core concepts of a programming languages. Once you know the fundamentals, you can pick up differ

I had the privilege of attending the International Women's Day Summit (# WTM17 ) at the Google NYC office on March 4th. I could have spent my Saturday morning sleeping in or lounging around doing whatever. Instead I decided I want to 1) meetup with former colleagues and friends, and 2) attend an inspiring event celebrating women in technology and women's history month. Even though I have many years of professional work experience, I left WTM17 feeling inspired and even more motivated and with a new goal in mind (read on!). I am doing well for myself but there is always room to improve. Never stop dreaming. Never stop sharing your story. The theme of the event was Telling Your Story (#TellingYourStory)  and what a day of storytelling it was. From stories of immigrating to the United States from the Philippines to dealing with imposter syndrome because you have a MFA from Columbia instead of a MS to shaving your head as a coping mechanism, each speaker had an important story t

How to play an audio file in iOS using Swift/Xcode version 7.0 I've also been fascinated by mobile applications. But I've spent most of my career coding desktop or web based applications. So I decided to change that by taking Udacity's Intro to iOS App Development with Swift . Good decision, right? Right. For the first project, we develop a very basic application which records audio and plays it back. The first iteration requires playing a predefined audio file back at different speeds (or rates, according to AVAudioPlayer nomenclature). Below are the high level steps and code samples to play an audio file using Swift 2.0. First things first, you need an audio file, say a movie_quote.mp3 somewhere on your file system.  Locate it! Drag that file from source directory to the target directory. In this case, the target directory is the Pitch Perfect project directory in Xcode. Now the file will be made available to the application source code. Make sure you select t