Online courses

I recently completed the Machine Learning Foundations course offered through Coursera by the University of Washington. I found it to be more accessible and more of a survey class than Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course. It was eye-opening to learn how powerful machine learning algorithms are relatively easy to begin working with. Thinking about what kinds of breakthroughs the present AI summer will lead to is exciting. I'll probably continue to take a hobbyist's interest in ML and deep learning--luckily there's an endless torrent of free or inexpensive material on the subject.

After that I decided to take another course that was more applicable to my regular SE job--Functional Programming Principles in Scala. So far the class is challenging and fun. And it's nice to have an excuse to work with IntelliJ IDEA. I have a decent grasp of practical functional programming from doing Clojure development at work, but I wanted to get a more formal exposure to it.