My upcoming university break

Mon Jun 06 2016

I am very lucky to have a very exciting university break ahead and all of the dates coincidentally worked out perfectly.

7 - 10 June: Human language technology winter school

I will start my packed holiday at the Human language technology winter school at STIAS in Stellenbosch organised by the HLT Research Group at the CSIR's Meraka Institute and the ESAT - PSI Speech Group at KU Leuven. The winter school is aimed at senior students. I don't know anything about human language technology, but I think the machine learning course of this semester would give me a good starting point.

13 June - 8 July: ZappiStore Internship

Next, I will do an internship at the Cape Town office of Zappi (opens new window). As far as I know, the Cape Town office used to be Intellection Software (opens new window) and have been incorporated into Zappi. I have previously done an internship at Business Optics (opens new window) which was in the same co-working space that Intellection Software used to be in. I met some of the developers from Zappi again at UCT's #breaktherules (opens new window) event and found my conversation with them very intellectually stimulating and they were really open-minded.

Zappi builds tools to automate market research. I hope to improve my knowledge and skills in both software development and data science with them during my internship. They use Ruby and since I have never worked with Ruby before, I plan to go about improving my knowledge of it in the following way:

• Work through the examples in Learn Ruby the Hard Way (opens new window) by Zed A. Shaw and Rob Sobers.
• Scan through Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen.
• Read Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby for fun (I've alway wanted to!).
• If there's time, I'd love to try some RubyKoans (opens new window).
• And some day, perhaps, rewrite this blog using this (opens new window) wonderful tutorial on how to build a CMS in Ruby on Rails.

During the time that I will be in Cape Town, I will also try to make the most of the interesting events happening in the city. So far, I plan to go attend the following events:

• 14 June: WomenInTechCPT: Tech Meets Journalism and Education (tickets (opens new window)).
• 23 June: THINK.Thursday - You are biased (event page (opens new window)).
• 5 July: PechaKucha Night #39 (event page (opens new window)).

10 - 16 July: Code4CT Code Camp Tutoring

I will end my break on a very positive note by tutoring at the Code4CT (opens new window) holiday coding camp for grade 10 girls. This will be a jam-packed camp where we will be staying in Grootte Schuur High School's hostel and the learners will have to develop a web dev project that they will demo at the end of the camp to their parents and friends. I have always wanted to tutor at one of these camps and I am very excited to meet the learners and my fellow tutors.

Honours Project

Throughout my break I will also continue to develop the software part of my honours project which I would have to demo again on 28 July. I hope to post regular progress updates on the development on this blog.