Why do we need feature scaling in Machine Learning and how to do it using SciKit Learn?Data Science by Sunny Srinidhi - July 27, 2018November 5, 20191 When you're working with a learning model, it is important to scale the features to a range which is centered around zero. This is done so that the variance of the features are in the same range. If a feature's variance is orders of magnitude more than the variance of other features, that particular feature might dominate other features in the dataset, which is not something we want happening in our model. The aim here is to to achieve Gaussian with zero mean and unit variance. There are many ways of doing this, two most popular are standardisation and normalisation. No matter which method you choose, the SciKit Learn library provides a class to easily scale our data. We can use the StandardScaler
What’s the difference between JSON and JavaScript object?Tech by Sunny Srinidhi - August 1, 2017March 18, 20200 Most often than you think, people confuse JSON with JavaScript objects. But are they same? Let’s see in this post.
Hide properties of Mongoose objects in Node.JS JSON responsesTech by Sunny Srinidhi - July 19, 2017July 19, 20170 Many a times, we'll encounter a situation where we'll have to hide certain properties of Mongoose objects, especially when we're sending those objects in responses. For example, suppose you have an API endpoint like so: /user/:id. You will, obviously, send a user object as a response to this request. But there will be certain properties of the User schema (such as password) which you'd want to remove before sending the object in the response. Laravel developers can relate this to the $hidden array in Eloquent models, which automatically hides the given list of properties before sending the object in the response. There is no out-of-the-box solution for this in Mongoose. But it's pretty easy to achieve, even though it's a bit verbose.
How to install ScalaTech by Sunny Srinidhi - June 8, 20170 The first question to ask is, what is Scala? Scala is an object-oriented, general purpose programming language, which is also functional. Scala also supports static typing. Scala was designed to give a simple interface for functional programming while addressing the criticism aimed at Java. The code written in Scala is compiled to Java bytecode, which then runs on JVM. So Scala and Java are interoperable. On the other hand, Scala offers some of the best known features of functional programming, including currying, type inference, immutability, and pattern matching. Higher-order types in Scala is also pretty awesome. People who have Java knowledge and have worked on other programming languages, such as PHP and NodeJS, would love to know that Scala has the best
Auto-discovery of packages in Laravel 5.5Tech by Sunny Srinidhi - June 2, 20171 Laravel 5.5 is right around the corner, and there are quite a few amazing features coming with this new version. Taylor Otwell has been writing about the framework's new features frequently. The latest feature that he has announced is the auto-discovery of packages, their service providers, and facade aliases. This means, starting Laravel 5.5, we'll not have to manually copy-paste anything to the providers and the aliases array in app.php in the config folder. So, if a package you're installing via composer has the required configuration in it's composer.json file, the framework will automatically register any providers and aliases provided by the package. Taylor Otwell also mentioned that he has already sent a pull request to the Laravel Debugbar package by Barry
Laravel’s new migrate:fresh commandTech by Sunny Srinidhi - April 12, 2017April 12, 20170 One of the features in Laravel, because of which I fell in love with the framework initially, is migrations. I don't remember how most other frameworks handle migrations, but Laravel's migration engine is super awesome. If you work with Laravel regularly, you'd have no doubt used a few migration commands, maybe for creating a migration file, running migrations, rolling back migrations, etc. During development, it's not uncommon to run into situations where you break your DB schema and wanting to start from scratch, you know, a blank DB. Laravel makes this super easy with the migrate:refresh command. When you run this command against your database, the tool runs the down() function in all your migration files, thereby going back in time
Create an animated GIF of your screencast on LinuxTech by Sunny Srinidhi - March 13, 20170 Animated GIFs of screencasts are everywhere today. How do you go from taking a screenshot of your desktop with the "Print Screen" button and recording a video of your desktop to creating an animated GIFs of your screencast to share on the internet? It's actually easier than you think. I'm going to tell you how to do it on a Linux machine, specifically Ubuntu, because I use an Ubuntu machine. The commands here are for Ubuntu, but they can very easily be ported to other *nix machines as well. First, you'll need to install a few tools: ImageMagick, MPlayer, and RecordMyDesktop. We'll be using RecordMyDesktop to record the activities on your screen or a portion of your screen as a video
A few basic (but powerful) ImageMagick commandsTech by Sunny Srinidhi - February 1, 2017February 6, 20211 If you’re not sure what ImageMagick is, it’s one of the greatest tools you could have on your computer, to manipulate images and a few other types of files. In this post, I’m going to list out a few of the commands which come in very handy in a variety of situations. Recently I got the opportunity to work on a project where a lot of images had to be manipulated — changing the resolution and keeping the file size in check. I wrote the script in PHP and ImageMagick was the weapon of choice. Before you read any further, if you are not aware of ImageMagick and the features it offers, go through their website first. Also, I’d like to point out that
Make Node.js debugging easier with colorful log messagesTech by Sunny Srinidhi - January 8, 2017February 9, 20170 I’m working on my second project in Node.js. I kind of love it. I haven’t yet decided to find out how better it performs compared to apps written in other languages, such as PHP, or Java. But writing Node.js apps is fun, mostly because you can get npm packages for almost everything you need during development. This helps you concentrate on the business logic and not worry about writing basic boilerplate code. What’s the advantage? Well, you can write a POC/MVP app really quickly. Anyway, one thing I noticed while working on the previous Node.js app was that debugging is a bit difficult if you, like me, have an obsession with having proper log messages everywhere. So one of the first
Not being an entrepreneur is not lameRants by Sunny Srinidhi - January 5, 2017February 9, 20170 I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m in the software development industry. I write code, a lot of code. And I read a lot of code too. I was a professional writer, blogging about anything tech. I was in the online ad industry for a few years, doing affiliate marketing, writing guest posts, and what not! The money was good, it was awesome. If you put your time and energy into it, almost everything has a chance to work out in your favour. Anyway, I got a chance to spend some time with a few college kids over the weekend, and I was kind of amused when I understood how that generation plans its future. They all want to start their own businesses,