Makerwork 001
A curated newsletter about makers for makers.
Hey Makers! 👋
Welcome to the premier digest of the newsletter. Miguel has the honor of being the first maker to be featured in Makerwork. 🏆
The main problem that beginners face when joining StackOverflow is that there are so many experts in so many activities that it is hard for a beginner to find questions that are good first issues.
With his passion for AI and programming, Miguel took on this challenge and created Answerable, a recommendation system for discovering StackOverflow unanswered questions. ⭐️
What I’ve Been Reading 📖
⭐️Are you going to learn that? - Ambiguity of “Programming” - DEV Community 👩💻👨💻: We live in the middle of an industrial revolution, brought by computers and telecommunications. I don’t need to tell you that our lives and habits have been turned upside down.
Saasify Key Takeaways: Everything I wish I’d known before starting Sassify 2 years ago.
My Three Strikes Rule for Blogging: A simple way to decide when and what to write.
The first year of my side project: Code Line Daily: It has been a year since I launched my side project, and I wanted to talk about the challenges along the way.
How to run a Dev Instagram page? 🤳: Today I’m here to share with you how was for me to run my developer Instagram page to 17k followers.
Tools I use as a Freelance Web Developer 🛠: I started freelancing about 4 years ago, and as I grew my freelance business, I used a lot of tools to help me with that.
Maker Focus 🏆
Featuring one or more makers per digest. Want to be featured as a maker? Fill in this form. ✍️
Miguel Mejia
Twitter LinkedIn DEV Buy Miguel a Coffee
Miguel is a Computer Science student in Malaga, Spain. He is skilled in C++, Python, communication and problem solving. ⚡ Also, he prepares a good coffee. ☕
He is currently learning the internals of git and webdev with Flask as he plans to use them in future projects. 📚
Product Focus 📦
⭐️ Answerable
A recommendation system for StackOverflow unanswered questions.
Language: python Stars: 2 Watchers: 2 Forks: 1 Issues: 0
Last commit: Jan 26, 2021 First commit: Dec 14, 2020
Answerable is a Python program that learns from your answers in Stack Overflow and use them to recommend questions that you could answer.
IHateToBudget
Language: python, html Stars: 14 Watchers: 2 Forks: 0 Issues: 0
A simple web app to understand and control your expenses. Designed to be self-hosted.
Sailboat
Language: python Stars: 8 Watchers: 1 Forks: 0 Issues: 0
Sailboat is a Python developer’s best friend. Let’s say that you have created a basic game, and you want to send it to all your friends.
All you have to do is type three commands: sail quickstart, sail build, and sail release, and you can have a Homebrew file, a pip installable package, and a PyInstaller desktop app. So easy!
An Interview with Miguel of Answerable
Hey Miguel! Let’s start out with your background. 📝
I am a Computer Science student in Malaga, Spain. I am interested in the state of education and how knowledge is shared, because I believe that they are a fundamental requirement to improve society.
I believe that open source software is a way to foster collaboration between individuals and a learning space as valid as any other.
Artificial intelligence and programming languages are my passion.
What is the purpose of your blog, and what resources do you use to get your ideas, if any? 🧩
General programming and computer science.
My best sources of ideas are conversations with others and my experiences as student and teacher.
What is an opinion you have that most people don’t agree with? ✒️
Computer Science degrees are not meant to teach you software development.
Why was Answerable started and is there a roadmap? 🎯
Answerable is my solution for a problem I faced when I joined StackOverflow. There are so many experts and so many activity that is difficult for beginners to get something done.
I thought that I would like someone to search through the questions and get me the ones I could answer, so I decided to automate that process. It was also an excuse to learn more about NLP and how recommendation systems work.
What is the most challenging problem that’s been solved in Answerable, so far? 🚧
Planning the data retrieval from the StackOverflow web. It is too spread out for fast regular web scraping, so I had to learn to use the API. However, some functions can only be used with authentication, and that’s something I still have to learn about.
Right now, Answerable uses a mix of API calls, RSS requests and an optional download, manually done by the user, to retrieve all the useful data to do the recommendations.
What is one product that you can’t live without that you think others should know about? 💡
I can’t think of a product, so I’ll say Bash aliases. I use them a lot.
If I gave you $1 million to invest in one thing right now, where would you put it? 🚀
Research for forest regeneration and ocean clean up.
Thank you Miguel.
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