Pilot

The first question that comes to mind, when starting a blog is the topic, the next one: "What to put in the first post?" I will start with a post describing myself and the topics I am working on.

I am Ole Kröger, 21 years old, computer science student at the Technical University Clausthal, a very small uni in Germany. In my early teens I had much free time and I was bored so my dad taught me Perl and everything started!

The coding stuff fascinated me a lot, so I wasn't bored anymore. There wasn't any big stuff for a long time, but I had fun. In 2011 Wikipedia wasn't a small part of my school research and I soon realized it has some disadvantages. Sometimes I've started a research and clicked on unfamiliar words and I often didn't make the way back to the initial topic. And I thought: It must be possible to improve Wikipedia to get rid of this problem.

Wikunia was born!

Wikunia shows several Wikipedia articles side by side to enhance the information flow.

Open Source

School was over and I had to fill the spare time until uni. Thankfully my friend Konstantin Kobs, designer of Wikunia, said, that I should sign up at GitHub and the cool stuff began. The first repository Table2Chart was a vision. It should be possible to visualize a table automatically to make it easier to read, right? It's just a "A picture is worth thousand words" thing. In some way Table2Chart is the first machine learning (ML) project which doesn't have an ML implementation. Some things are easy, correct? It is easy to say, that a table which contains dates and some numbers can be interpreted as a line chart and so on. It isn't always easy as that so I'm stuck but the vision is still there... If you have an idea, tell me about it!

Brackets

Oh it was Konstantin again who told me about Brackets, which is an open source editor to code for the web. The best thing about it: It's written in JS and has an extension manager. Ideas are exploding in my head so I've started to code QuickDocsPHP, which shows PHP docs inside the editor. Actually I have to say, that Brackets is normally a thing for front-end guys and I am using it for PHP, cause I think it's easily expandable and you can make it an editor for everything! Really: Some minutes ago I've coded some Python and LaTeX stuff inside of it, last weekend a small homework using C++ which has absolutely nothing to do with the idea behind Brackets. Konstantin liked the inline documentation idea and cause he is the front-end guy behind Wikunia I had to code kind of the same thing for JS: QuickDocsJS. At the moment I have seven extensions and four are about documentation. Isn't it one of the bad parts about coding? With all these extensions I think different about it cause it's fun now, at least using JS and PHP :)

Machine Learning

One of the big parts of this blog will be about ML. I am not an expert in ML but I think that doesn't mean that this blog has to be a bad idea. ML is growing and a lot of people wanna learn it. This blog is for beginners so I will start with the basics in my next entry, which will be published next Monday. Simple neural nets without hidden layers that can learn some small things. Of course there is some maths behind it, but I will try to explain it using examples and not make it too complicated.

I will always add some links for further information that might be interesting for some of you to go deeper. Some posts later I'll write about OCR using MNIST data. Each post will have a comment section at the bottom. Every feedback is appreciated!

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