BackendBear

What do you get when you combine music, AI and 2 creative minds? You get my favorite musical anarchists Dadabots. CJ and Zack are with us today.

Personally, I've been a big fan for a while now and was very ecstatic when they said yes to be on the show. 

We talked about AI, Machine learning, music, sample RNN and where to get started and how you can help the cause.

The drive that these fellows have is very inspiring. If they were lacking knowledge for a certain goal they were right on it and conquered it. Today, they are writing Science papers and doing a lot of performances and participating in different projects. 

I will say that these guys are the modern day scientists and the artists of the future and have my full support.

PS They are metalheads as well and to me it is only icing on the cake.

More about Dadabots can be found dadabots.com

Links

• Magenta online music tools 
• • https://magenta.tensorflow.org/
• MidiMe
• • https://magenta.tensorflow.org/midi-me
• Music Autobot - generates pop music
• • https://musicautobot.com/
• GP2T collab 
• • https://github.com/Cortexelus/gpt-2-colab
• How to fine tune GP2T
• • https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-fine-tune-gpt-2-so-you-can-generate-long-form-creative-writing-7a5ae1314a61
• Cocou
• • https://coconet.glitch.me/
• OpenAI Jukebox
• • https://github.com/openai/jukebox

Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall when 2 senior fullstack developers are having a heart-to-heart conversation? Then this is the episode for you. Today we have Harry Bellamy who is a senior .net engineer and a fellow musician all the way from Leeds, UK

Links:

• "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expanded/dp/0465050654
• C# Fluent API https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/ef6/modeling/code-first/fluent/types-and-properties
• Vinyl Casino - https://soundcloud.com/vinylcasino

This week I had Vincent Tang on the show. We tried to compare lessons that we learned from as fullstack developers, we talked about how to organize your spare time and space for your hobbies and work. 

Links:

• Vincent's personal website - vincentntang.com
• Vincent's Twitter - @vincentntang 

Books:

• "Getting Things Done" by David Allen - amazon.com
• "Atomic Habits" by James Clear - amazon.com

Today we have the pleasure of getting to know Gary Krause

He is a ninja software developer, a veteran, devoted husband and a father, and has a big passion for Pathfinder role playing games. 

Tools:

• Visual studio Live Share - It doesn’t matter what type of app you are building, what language you program in, or what OS you’re on; with Live Share you can instantly share your project with your peers from the comfort of your own tools. No need to clone a repo or set up the environment, to get sharing.

Contributions:

• Operation Code - the largest community of military veterans, service members, and spouses committed to becoming software developers with the help of mentors, scholarships, and our tech partners operationcode.org
• Mythic Table - it is a Non-profit, Open Source online platform for tabletop role-playing games. www.mythictable.com

Links:

• Github - garyray-k.github.io
• Twitter - @GaryRKrause1
• LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/garyraykrause/

Today we will dive into a bit of history of algorithmic music composition, some of the projects that are out there and the project that I worked on as part of my master thesis. 

I had a blast making this episode and it is a topic I am passionate about.

References:

1. John A. Maurer IV - “A brief history of algorithmic music composition”
   https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~blackrse/algorithm.html
2. Donald Jay Grout - "History of Western Music" -
   https://www.amazon.com/History-Western-Music-Donald-1996-03-30/dp/B01JXT3578 
3. Alpern, Adam (1995) -"Techniques for algorithmic composition of music"
   http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.23.9364&rep=rep1&type=pdf
4. John Cage - "Cage, Music, art, chess"
   https://youtu.be/Hva8WMcRyOE 
5. Axis Of Awesome - "4 Chord Song"
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I 
6. Dadabots - Generating death metal music using neural networks
   http://dadabots.com/
7. Melody Brains - http://melodybrains.com/ 

In this episode I am tackling the topic of dealing with brand new applications.

How to design them, implement them, pick the right technologies, where to start?

Bear in mind (yeah I said it) that all of these are coming from my personal professional experiences and it is a system that worked for me so far.

Additional reading material:

• Business requirements information
• Repository Design Pattern information

Any suggestions, comments, questions and concerns? Feel free to contact me at

• Email - [email protected]
• Twitter - @backendbear
• Youtube - youtube.com/channel/UCb7Y9bvj4I-Rm4a-Ewmj1aA
• Facebook - facebook.com/backendbearpodcast
• Website - backendbear.com 

• There is nowhere to run, there is nowhere to hide. 
• You have been tasked to work on a legacy project.
• Don't despair because you've been tasked with an old junker. Be proud that someone trusts your skills enough that you can go in, replace those parts and make that old timer a head turner.
• In this episode I will try to share some of my experiences and tips and tricks with dealing with legacy code. Helped me out, hoping that I will help you out as well

Any suggestions, comments, questions and concerns? Feel free to contact me at

• Email - [email protected]
• Twitter - @backendbear
• Youtube - youtube.com/channel/UCb7Y9bvj4I-Rm4a-Ewmj1aA
• Facebook - facebook.com/backendbearpodcast
• Website - backendbear.com 

Today we have a lot of 3rd party libraries and toolkits that would help us launch an entire website in a matter of minutes.
That makes our software development life easier but it feels like it created a gap between front end and backend development.
With the pace of new technologies it makes it harder to keep up with everything. Joe and me are trying to address that problem.

You can find Joe at:

• Coding blocks - https://www.codingblocks.net/
• Personal website - https://joezack.com/

Developer Road map -
https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap 

Books:

• Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit
  https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Software-Development-Agile-Toolkit/dp/0321150783 
• Pragmatic Programmer
  https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master/dp/020161622X 
• Badass: Making users awesome
  https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp/1491919019 

Lyrics:

Oh it's the Joe Zack,
and he‘s guest on the show, the show, the show, the show
it's the Joe Zack,
he's a guest on the show, show, show,

Bad code, bad code, he'll make the system lean,
When it comes to clean code, he's a mean machine,
also he's a talk show host
podcast from coast to coast
Coding blocks!

it's the Joe Zack,
he's a guest on the show

Any suggestions, comments, questions and concerns? Feel free to contact me at

• Email - [email protected]
• Twitter - @backendbear
• Youtube - youtube.com/channel/UCb7Y9bvj4I-Rm4a-Ewmj1aA
• Facebook - facebook.com/backendbearpodcast

• This week I am starting a new series called Design Patterns.
• It is one of those things that you probably used a lot of times but were never aware of it.
• There isn't a job interview that goes without asking questions about design patterns  and it's always the one you forgot to read about.
• This episode is more of an introduction to design patterns where we tried to answer the following questions:
  • What are they?
  • How are they classified?
  • How are they describing the problems?
  • Some basic concepts sprinkled with some of my own experience with the Anchorman Android app.

Useful links:

• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software 
• dofactory.com/net/design-patterns
• Anchorman android app

Any suggestions, comments, questions and concerns? Feel free to contact me at

• Email - [email protected]
• Twitter - @backendbear
• Youtube - youtube.com/channel/UCb7Y9bvj4I-Rm4a-Ewmj1aA
• Facebook - facebook.com/backendbearpodcast

This week we are talking about microservices where we tried to answer some of the questions like:

• What are they?
• How to implement them?
• How to deal with them?
• What are the pitfalls when implementing them?

More about Zac can be found at

• codingcoach.io
• manning.com/livevideo/react-in-motion
• React in motion book 
• 40% promo code use: ytbraddy
• medium.com/@zackerthehacker
  • twitch.tv/tinfoilsaint

Lyrics from the intro:

Today is gonna be the day,
Zac Brady is on my show,
By now you should somehow,
Hear one of his talks,
I don’t believe that anybody,
Feels the way he does,
on microservices

Brady, is the main lead,
He’s a Fullstack dev at Koodoo,
If people want to save more,
On their mortgage then without a doubt
Use Koodoo as the digital platform
It'll make him feel so good, about you now

Any suggestions, comments, questions and concerns? Feel free to contact me at

• Email - [email protected]
• Twitter - @backendbear
• Youtube - youtube.com/channel/UCb7Y9bvj4I-Rm4a-Ewmj1aA
• Facebook - facebook.com/backendbearpodcast