JAXLondon 2017: Agile Machine Learning [VIDEO]

Last October a colleague and I gave a talk at the JAXLondon Conference about Machine Learning in an agile, commercial environment (I then also gave the talk again in November in Munich at the W-JAX Conference).




The video of the talk is now available - the first half (and end section) is mostly softer stuff, where I talk about lessons learnt from doing ML research in a commercial environment and the middle section is my colleague, Sumanas, talking about how Word2Vec works and some more interesting demos of using it in an interesting application!




In related conference speaking news, I will be in Berlin next month for the API Conference to talk about Product Management and API Design: https://apiconference.net/api-design-documentation/your-api-as-a-product-thinking-like-a-product-manager/

Monster dash - Making an android game with my son

At the start of last year, 2017, I set a resolution, of sorts, to build a mobile app with my older boy. He was just getting into playing games on mobile phones and tablets, and lots of them were just simple side scrolling platform games, where your character just had to run and avoid minor obstacles and perils.

Needless to say, whilst I managed to start it, it wasn't until after Easter this year that I actually managed to complete it. Now, this did appear to pose one problem: over a year later since the idea, my boy was playing far more sophisticated games so when I pitched the idea of making a mobile game together, his plans went far beyond the simple side scrolling platform game I had in mind! I was a bit unsure if he was going to be totally underwhelmed by the finished product that we were making, but in the end, having seen his creation come to life he was thoroughly pleased.



When we finally had something working (albeit fairly primitive) he took it into school as a show-and-tell, and surprisingly, the other children were all very impressed - I assume just because of the feat of making a game, despite in paling in comparison to actual games they undoubtedly all played.




Anyway, the source code for the game is all on Github (maybe one day we will make a game and publish it, so he can see that process and actually have other people play his game) and can be found here: https://github.com/robhinds/monster-dash.  I can't take much credit for the legwork on this one though - knowing that the game concept I was after was very simple, I figured there would be a how-to somewhere lurking on the internet, and sure enough we stumbled upon this: http://williammora.com/a-running-game-with-libgdx-part-1 - If you want to have a go I would recommend following William's series of articles explaining the hows and whats. I modified (read mangled) his source code a bit, simplified parts and added flourishes here and there, but its very similar in theory.



To be honest, the hardest part was cleaning up the images - He drew them, then I just snapped them with my phone, used a selection of online tools to remove backgrounds and chop them up for my animation, then loaded them into the app.

My boy really enjoyed working on it, and still asks if we can make another app, with even grander ideas, so I highly recommend it!