Post: #151

(03-29-2016 03:08 AM)mbare Wrote:  Anyone here trying to learn Swift 2? Open source now!

Swift 2 is on my to-do list. Apple launched Xcode 7 for it as well. The only issue is that you absolutely need an OS computer. So either a Mac, or a PC with a Virtual Machine running OS X

Post: #152

@AlphaHunterZero: Always, always, always use an IDE.

I'm using Swift 2 in Xcode 7.2 to build an iOS app for a school project. Honestly, I prefer Android dev but Swift/Xcode isn't that bad once you get used to Apple's way of building things. Problem is when you try to do something that Swift natively doesn't support, but luckily there are a good amount of libraries for Swift: https://github.com/Wolg/awesome-swift

Post: #153

Has Swift begun to be of any interest in the iOS dev market?

I've been working with ancient shit at a bank for a while. Haven't written much iOS code lately, but last time I checked nobody gave two shits about whether it was ObjC or Swift.

Post: #154

(03-29-2016 09:29 PM)jj90 Wrote:  @AlphaHunterZero: Always, always, always use an IDE.

I normally have various windows open at the same time when programming, IDE(s) included. One is from the book I'm studying from, one is notepad, one is an IDE, either NetBeans and/or PHP Designer. The problem was that I didn't have the IDE at full screen, otherwise I would've noticed the quotes and messed around with them. Lesson learned.

I upgraded my current NetBeans from version 7.1.1 to the latest version 8.1. A cool perk of v8.1 is that it comes PACKED with programs and plug-ins all set up to use (PHP included, although I tried to but still haven't learned how to properly set up and use it on NetBeans yet) and as an added bonus I can still use v7.1.1 alongside it.

PHP Designer is a little simpler to use, and so far it's been great for finding syntax errors, although I still need to set it up to use a local server (localhost) for processing code. I found that it can be set up with Wampserver so I'll definitely look into that as it would be more convenient to have an all in one package to use.

Post: #155

Comparison price engine?

Easy project for a newb, or multi-million dollars in development with grizzled veterans demanding Tibetan yak butter tea?

WIA

Post: #156

@WIA

A lot depends on what kind of software you are selling and who your customers are.

Most newbs will for example have a hard time selling software to big companies, you need a well-oiled machinery to do that; from sales teams with nifty powerpoint and graphs, to on-call support etc. They (big companies) have many hurdles set up for vendors to insure that no purchase can possibly go wrong (which in turn makes their purchases a lot more expensive and yes, things still go wrong... sometimes a lot).

Post: #157

I'd be making this for me, not trying to sell it. I'm not interested in working for anyone or selling software.

1) cheaper sneakers and pocket squares!
2) So that I could actually learn to program without going back to school.

My Google searches show the broad strokes of how people do this, but I don't know enough about the field to know if
- crawling a site
- putting a few million skus into a spreadsheet,
- doing it again with another site
- then normalizing the product entries...
- Then comparing the apples to apples

is super difficult.

Comparing iPhone accessory prices could be a nightmare because of random naming conventions that make sense to users but would require a ton of individual if/then rules for a computer.

Ideally I could dump in two sites and then get my inventory price data in a few days. Wouldn't need to be minute by minute/latest/most up to date numbers, but I'm looking at the entire inventory not just individual models of specific items.

I know that such a thing is possible, but it's a question of time, skill, and money.

Thanks for responding

Post: #158

(04-04-2016 03:27 PM)WestIndianArchie Wrote:  I'd be making this for me, not trying to sell it. I'm not interested in working for anyone or selling software.

1) cheaper sneakers and pocket squares!
2) So that I could actually learn to program without going back to school.

My Google searches show the broad strokes of how people do this, but I don't know enough about the field to know if
- crawling a site
- putting a few million skus into a spreadsheet,
- doing it again with another site
- then normalizing the product entries...
- Then comparing the apples to apples

is super difficult.

Comparing iPhone accessory prices could be a nightmare because of random naming conventions that make sense to users but would require a ton of individual if/then rules for a computer.

Ideally I could dump in two sites and then get my inventory price data in a few days. Wouldn't need to be minute by minute/latest/most up to date numbers, but I'm looking at the entire inventory not just individual models of specific items.

I know that such a thing is possible, but it's a question of time, skill, and money.

Thanks for responding

Python is a great tool for this.

The degree of difficulty is going to depend on how feature-rich you want the code to be.

A few fun things to try would be:
- Use regular expressions to parse the different naming conventions.
- Rather than a series of if/then or case statements use a dictionary (or some other form of lookup table) with function handles to dynamically identify and handle new cases.

Post: #159

(04-04-2016 03:27 PM)WestIndianArchie Wrote:  - crawling a site
- putting a few million skus into a spreadsheet,
- doing it again with another site
- then normalizing the product entries...
- Then comparing the apples to apples

Crawling the site to build up the data is the difficult and labor intensive part.

Crunching the numbers at the end is the easy part. Use a SQL database, not spreadsheets.

You can expect crawling the site to throw up random obstacles that are different from one site to the next:
- product code not shown on page
- captcha codes
- site refuses connection if you hammer it with repeated queries on its pages
- page structure is different to what it was when this worked last month.

edited to add: you might be able to get a running start on the web crawling thing using an API

Post: #160

@WIA: I'm gonna try to keep this constructive but gathering from the tone of your post, you might want to take a night course at your local community college with a focus on web development if you have not done so already.

The biggest challenge technically you will have with that idea is the scraping of the sites. Likely there is no API for the data you want, so it isn't going to be easy. You can try this out, I've heard good things about them. Kimono API: https://www.kimonolabs.com/

For your case specifically, I would focus on just building a simple product site with database connectivity as a start, once you feel you can crank 1 out over a weekend, then start implementing the scraper portion and price comparison.

You are building it for yourself as a project, but to give you an idea of the cost and technical req's because there is a business behind it, this site:

http://www.coffeefoundry.net/

might be a few hundred. This:

http://www.kleinfeldbridal.com/contact.cfm

is maybe 20K +- 10K.

Good luck.

Post: #161

Thanks guys!

Much better basis to make a decision on taking a formal course.

WIA

Post: #162

(04-04-2016 03:27 PM)WestIndianArchie Wrote:  I'd be making this for me, not trying to sell it. I'm not interested in working for anyone or selling software.

1) cheaper sneakers and pocket squares!
2) So that I could actually learn to program without going back to school.

My Google searches show the broad strokes of how people do this, but I don't know enough about the field to know if
- crawling a site
- putting a few million skus into a spreadsheet,
- doing it again with another site
- then normalizing the product entries...
- Then comparing the apples to apples

is super difficult.

Comparing iPhone accessory prices could be a nightmare because of random naming conventions that make sense to users but would require a ton of individual if/then rules for a computer.

Ideally I could dump in two sites and then get my inventory price data in a few days. Wouldn't need to be minute by minute/latest/most up to date numbers, but I'm looking at the entire inventory not just individual models of specific items.

I know that such a thing is possible, but it's a question of time, skill, and money.

Thanks for responding

The team at Google Shopping has been working on this for a very long time. Why not use their work? They basically wrote a script to do what you want to do and it's actually pretty decent these days.
cf. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&q...ket+square

Post: #163

@storm

It's not about cheap goods.
I want to make something.

You guys that do this all day might think I'm crazy for reinventing the wheel, but it is what it is.

WIA

Post: #164

http://www.businessinsider.com/guy-makes...tes-2016-4

lol

Post: #165

(04-05-2016 12:03 PM)WestIndianArchie Wrote:  @storm

It's not about cheap goods.
I want to make something.

You guys that do this all day might think I'm crazy for reinventing the wheel, but it is what it is.

WIA

I think you would enjoy making some of these sorts of things:
Analyze tweets on the first 2016 GOP Presidential Debate
Classify handwritten digits using the famous MNIST data
Predict survival on the Titanic using Excel, Python, R & Random Forests
Use Google's Word2Vec to do what rottentomatoes does for movie reviews

Post: #166

(04-05-2016 12:03 PM)WestIndianArchie Wrote:  @storm

It's not about cheap goods.
I want to make something.

You guys that do this all day might think I'm crazy for reinventing the wheel, but it is what it is.

WIA

If you want to make something try using implementing it on whatever mobile platform you're currently using. If you have an iPhone that would be iOS, if you have an Android phone, that would be Android. Mobile development will continue to grow and these days your phone contains so much tech and connectivity that the sky is the limit with respect to problems you can solve and ideas that you can bring to fruition.

Post: #167

Is anyone doing machine learning/neural nets? If so, what is the difficulty level involved? Do you have to be a top 10% programmer or computer science PHD to get into it on a sufficient level that you are able to apply it to non-trivial problems?

Post: #168

Programming neural nets is very easy - especially now that clock cycles and memory are cheap. Building a good training set, identifying the right cost function and ensuring you get real results is where the expertise lies.

Post: #169

Lost my job about a month ago working as a VB.net programming. I realize VB.net is seen as kind of a joke language by "hardcore" programmers so I've been working on expanding my skill set. The MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node.js) seems to be hot right now so I've been working on learning those. I've been meaning to improve my Javascript skills anyways and since everything in that stack is written in Javascript this is a good way to go about doing that. Front-end development and making a site look nice has always been a weakness of mine so I've been working on learning Jquery and CSS as well.

Gonna work on making a basic CRUD site with the technologies I talked about above and use that to show off to employers. I have a feeling that a lot of other developers looking for jobs are doing the same too so I was wondering if it might be a better idea to do a project that's a bit more unusual. I actually have master's degree in CS but honestly that hasn't really seemed to help much in my job search so I'm planning to instead make some stuff on my own and hopes that's enough to impress an employer.

Post: #170

(04-04-2016 03:27 PM)WestIndianArchie Wrote:  My Google searches show the broad strokes of how people do this, but I don't know enough about the field to know if
- crawling a site
- putting a few million skus into a spreadsheet,
- doing it again with another site
- then normalizing the product entries...
- Then comparing the apples to apples

Ideally I could dump in two sites and then get my inventory price data in a few days. Wouldn't need to be minute by minute/latest/most up to date numbers, but I'm looking at the entire inventory not just individual models of specific items.

WIA, first, thanks for all your contributions to the forum!

Second, I have built numerous web scraping applications including one that would pull skus out of a website (top USA retailer).

I built mine using tools that are basically used for testing websites. I have seen some good work done with Python and some of the python libraries that can do web scraping but for many sites you have to run a real or virtual web browser to render the page and get the data.

I built my last scraper with Selenium, GEB (a Groovy Selenium package), and Groovy. PM me if you want to know more. I could share some source code with you.

G

Post: #171

There is a really good book in the O'Reilly series on web scraping with Python called, incidentally, Web Scraping With Python.

Post: #172

(05-11-2016 07:44 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  There is a really good book in the O'Reilly series on web scraping with Python called, incidentally, Web Scraping With Python.

Coursera also has a free course on learning Python. I've heard good things about it. Personally if I were building a web scraper I'd probably use Python. I've heard Beautiful Soup is a good library for doing the scraping. I used it many years ago, the thing is like 12 years old now and still maintained, so it's battle tested.

Post: #173

Greetings gentlemen,
nice to meet some colleagues in such a place

I am in my mid 30s working in Moscow where I was born, doing some enterprise Java stuff, I am slightly above regular developer position doing some managing activities also.

Now I wonder what to do next. Several options in front of me:
1. go on with IT career, try to make it in some big companies in Russia
2. find remote job and go travelling. Of course I will lose in money and position but life will be a lot of fun and we live only once, right.
3. move to some western or eastern country. I lose in position, but this can be considered as travelling and fun too. I do not expect career there and finally i would like to settle down in Russia.
4. start own business, which is the most interesting option, but i dont know how. these days the rates of russian programmers in usd have dropped significantly so may be outsourcing in Russia can be an option.. But how can I get into it? No idea.

These are the options I have. Probably some of you have ever thought about the same and you can share your ideas or experience.

Post: #174

Don't worry about "position" mate, just think about "opportunities" - current and future.

I bet you could do a year of freelance/remote work while travelling and still enhance your career prospects. Especially if you picked your projects carefully.

That would also set you up for starting a business later on - business is a massive jump from pure technical work (you gotta learn sales, marketing, management, operations...) and freelancing bridges the gap.

Post: #175

(05-14-2016 02:02 AM)TheMoscower Wrote:  Greetings gentlemen,
nice to meet some colleagues in such a place

I am in my mid 30s working in Moscow where I was born, doing some enterprise Java stuff, I am slightly above regular developer position doing some managing activities also.

Now I wonder what to do next. Several options in front of me:
1. go on with IT career, try to make it in some big companies in Russia
2. find remote job and go travelling. Of course I will lose in money and position but life will be a lot of fun and we live only once, right.
3. move to some western or eastern country. I lose in position, but this can be considered as travelling and fun too. I do not expect career there and finally i would like to settle down in Russia.
4. start own business, which is the most interesting option, but i dont know how. these days the rates of russian programmers in usd have dropped significantly so may be outsourcing in Russia can be an option.. But how can I get into it? No idea.

These are the options I have. Probably some of you have ever thought about the same and you can share your ideas or experience.

Mid-life crisis?

I'm worried because of your 3rd point.

I know many Russians and most of them want to stay in the golden west, although they have multiple degrees and could easily land a job in Moscow, Piter or whatever big city. Of course they want to stay because of all the benefits the west offers them like a bigger salary for example. If you are skilled at Java Enterprise stuff I assume you won't have any problems finding a job for example in France, Germany or England. I know many company at first hand who would be glad to take you!

Why aren't you married and have kids?