DEV Community: Ryan

PolyFriends, a New Twitter Bot

Ryan — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 02:59:13 +0000

Hey all! Over the past few days I've been working on a new Twitter bot, and thought I should make a quick post here. PolyFriends is a bot that creates little unique polygon characters with their own name and hobby. Though they're quite simple looking, I honestly like the way it turned out. You can find the source code on Github if you're interested.

Some tweets from the bot:

PolyFriends

@polyfriendsbot

This is lanita, and they like collecting artwork!
Their favorite color is lavender indigo.
Created on 6/25/2020 at 14:00 PST

21:00 PM - 25 Jun 2020

0 0

PolyFriends

@polyfriendsbot

This is Pippy, and they like do it yourself!
Their favorite color is liseran purple.
Created on 6/23/2020 at 19:40 PST

02:40 AM - 24 Jun 2020

0 0

My First Machine Learning Experiment

Ryan — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 22:28:47 +0000

I've always been interested in AI, but never took the time to learn it. This time, I wanted it to be different. After creating a simple model in Tensorflow to recognize hand-written digits from the MNIST dataset, I started learning how to create an RNN.

The idea was to take my personal Instagram DMs and train a model on them to generate text. Seeing as how I'm a complete noob when it comes to machine learning stuff, most of the model I wrote is just my interpretation of Tensorflow's text generation with an RNN tutorial. I barely understood any of the terminology, but Google came in handy.

Here are some of the results of the trained model! The results have been heavily curated since even though they're unique phrases, they can still sometimes contain private things.

doesn't even take it request of Spone.?!?!
Like what website?
Lol
Oh yeah
Spent you do this time
From the spetify like, that it would be faster
AHHH
oh
Someone shopp day tbh

As you can see, smaller more common phrases are replicated perfectly. However larger sentences make no sense. They can be funny though. You can even see some basic grammar rules like contractions and commas. This little experiment was really fun to do, if not infuriating at times.

My First Game with Unity

Ryan — Fri, 01 May 2020 00:22:31 +0000

Hey all! Over the past month or two I've been slowly working on my first game built with Unity, Blokke! It's not anything extraordinary, but it still was a nice learning experience for me. Blokke is a clone of one of my favorite games, Tetris. In fact the word "blokke" is Danish for blocks.

Here are some of the "major" features of Blokke:

Support for control pad input.
The ability to hold blocks and use them later.
A preview showing the next three blocks to be spawned.
A basic level system with increasing difficulty.

So far the only build is for Windows. Once I get it to its final state I'll add a Linux build, which will be soon. Give it a try if you want!

Visual-mov / blokke

A Tetris clone game for desktop

Blokke

Blokke is a open source Tetris clone with a green & blue aesthetic. It includes most core features and mechanics of Tetris, such as a holding function and scoring system. I built Blokke as a way to get familiar with Unity.

Running

Clone repo:

~$ git clone https://github.com/Visual-mov/blokke

Navigate to blokke/Builds, and select the file for your platform. Currently only Windows is supported.

Controls

The controls for Blokke are also included in the "About" menu. Blokke supports keyboard or control pad for input.

Move block left              | A or left on d-pad
Move block right             | D or right on d-pad
Move block down              | S or down on d-pad
Move block down continuously | W or up on d-pad
Rotate block                 | Space or button 3
Hold block                   | Q or button 2

Screenshots

View on GitHub

How has the Coronavirus been affecting you?

Ryan — Sat, 11 Apr 2020 07:37:06 +0000

How has this pandemic (emotionally or the virus itself) been affecting your daily routine and life? It's taken me a while to accept that my normal daily life has now been changed drastically for the foreseeable future, and it still scares me sometimes. I don't want to get too personal, but this last semester is very meaningful to me, and thinking about having the rest of it cancelled and moved online can hurt sometimes. However now I'm looking on the brighter side, which is all this free-time I have!

How has all of this personally affected you?

Hey Scala Programmers, What do you do?

Ryan — Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:26:09 +0000

I was thinking about learning some new jvm language, and Scala's features interested me. But what is Scala used for commercially? What kinds of applications are developed using it?

Why Do You Develop/Program?

Ryan — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 06:56:58 +0000

Other than it possibly being your job, what kind of personal satisfaction do you get when programming in general? Just curious :D

What Are Your Plans for 2020?

Ryan — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 23:12:51 +0000

First of all, Happy New Year's Eve! 🎉🎉🎉 As for those of you already in 2020, Happy New Year!

Over this past year, I've learned so much about software development, and improved my skills as a developer. However as we move into the new year, I feel it's important to have a (general) idea of what I plan to accomplish and learn.

I've outlined a few rough goals I aim to accomplish in this fast-approaching new year:

Learn game development with Unity, and possibly launching some kind of small indie game.
Continue learning language design / compiler design.
Incorporate machine learning into a project in some way.
Step up my development skills by learning and implementing more design patterns.

I'd love to hear your goals for the new year!

The Colorful Julia Twitter Bot

Ryan — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 04:53:59 +0000

A few months ago, I had the idea to make a Twitter bot. However I didn't have any good ideas for a bot at the time, so I put the project on hold. That is until a little over a week ago, where I developed an idea and started working on it. Now it's finished!

Colorful Julia is a Twitter bot that tweets random Julia sets with different colorization. Information about the generated image is also included, such as the maximum amount of iterations, value for c, and the 'color mode'.

Colorful Julia

@colorjulia_bot

Julia set generated on 12/23/2019 at 18:30 PST
Iterations: 150
Coloring mode: "rand_glow"
c = -0.8164189758590714 + -0.1624390742411137i

02:34 AM - 24 Dec 2019

1 2

Both writing the bot and hosting it was an incredible learning experience for me. Feel free to make your own bot from my code if you wish.

Here's the link to the source code:

Visual-mov / Colorful-Julia

A Twitter bot that tweets random Julia sets.

Colorful Julia Twitter Bot

Colorful Julia is a Twitter bot that tweets random Julia sets. Along with the image itself, the tweet also includes information about the rendered Julia set. Such as the maximum amount of iterations, value of c, and the colorization method. Colorful Julia uses the tweepy wrapper to communicate with the Twitter API.

More information about Julia sets

Installation

Clone repo:

~$ git clone https://github.com/Visual-mov/Colorful-Julia

Install requirements:

~$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Running

Run main script:

~$ python3 colorful_julia.py [--date_img] [--no_tweet] [--path p]

'--path p' - Give different path to save images. Default path is ./saves

'--date_img' - Save each Julia set image with a unique date and time code instead of overwriting previous image.

'--no_tweet' - Will not tweet created image. No keys file is needed as well.

Location for API keys

If you intend for the script to tweet the created image, a file containing…

View on GitHub

How do you visualize new concepts?

Ryan — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 20:05:20 +0000

For me personally, I usually grab a notepad and start sketching out how various parts and aspects of the whatever I'm trying to learn are connected. I also find that writing in your own dialect of pseudocode works well too.

My Goals for Hacktoberfest.

Ryan — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 04:09:04 +0000

Wow! It's Hacktoberfest again. This time I'm actually participating, instead of signing up and doing nothing like last year. This time though, I'm finally going through with it, and contributing to the open source community.

Why didn't I participate last year?

I'm not exactly sure. I remember really wanting to get a free t-shirt, but that's about it. At the time I mostly used Github to host my projects, and I didn't really get the collaborative side of it.

My goals for this month.

Familiarize myself to open source on Github. I want to learn the in's and out's of how repositories are maintained and contributed to, and how to do the same for my repositories.
Make at least four meaningful pull requests. None of this "Add your name to the document" nonsense, I want to make actual real pull requests on software that I use, or find interesting. Either to resolve issues, or helping with development.
Open my future projects to contributors. Like I said before, I've always used Github purely for hosting projects. My whole thing was that I didn't want people editing my code. I wanted it to be purely written by me. Of course, I see how that way of thinking is flawed.
Maybe get a free t-shirt. 😉

Welp, those are my main goals that I've set for myself this month. Hopefully I can actually achieve them. If so, Hacktoberfest is sure to be a good personal learning experience.

How to avoid demotivation while working on a project?

Ryan — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 18:55:04 +0000

It's happened a couple times to me before, and I'm wondering if there's any good general advice to avoid becoming demotivated.

What's your first experience with programming/coding?

Ryan — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 23:04:39 +0000

Happy programmers' day 2019 everyone! What was the first time you remember programming? The first time I actually formally programmed anything was at 13. I took a Python beginners class over the summer at Portland State University. From that day, programming and software development has been a part of my life.