Rob Janssen

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Visual Studio "15" Preview

Today, we are happy to announce the release of the Visual Studio "15" Preview. This new release includes our most recent feature innovations and improvements. Important Note This is an unsupported prerelease version of Visual Studio.

Reinforcement learning part 1: Q-learning and exploration

We’ve been running a reading group on Reinforcement Learning (RL) in my lab the last couple of months, and recently we’ve been looking at a very entertaining simulation for testing RL strategies, ye’ old cat vs mouse paradigm.

Why I (still) write code

For nearly two decades, I’ve been writing some form of code. But, the primary reason I code has changed over time. In the beginning, I wrote code simply to make something real.

Pulley Logic Gates

The essence of digital computing is the use of continuous physical states to represent a discrete number of symbols and the ability to perform logic based on those symbols. Although electronic circuits are exceptionally well-suited for this, any system that can handle symbols as both input and outpu

Watch Paint Dry: How I got a game on the Steam Store without anyone from Valve ever looking at it.

If you were on the Steam homepage on Sunday night, you might have noticed a somewhat interesting new title available: “Watch paint dry”.

10 Easy Steps to a Complete Understanding of SQL

Too many programmers think SQL is a bit of a beast. It is one of the few declarative languages out there, and as such, behaves in an entirely different way from imperative, object-oriented, or even functional languages (although, some say that SQL is also somewhat functional).

Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe

Connor Krukosky is an 18 year old college student with a hobby of collecting vintage computers. One day, he decided to buy his own mainframe...an IBM z890. This is his story. Connor's presentation 'I just Bought an IBM z890 - Now What?' - was featured at SHARE in San Antonio in March, 2016. For more

Semantic Versioning

Versioning your software is very important. Most people, and by people I mean engineers, assume they know how versioning works and in a lot of cases they are correct. However, it can't hurt to deep dive into how it works and why it works when it's done right.

HTTP/HTTPS not working inside your VM? Wait for it.

Have you ever run into a problem, done some troubleshooting, but decided it only affected yourself, and shelved it for a while? I did that a couple of a months ago with a particular problem which forced its way back into my life this morning.

Magical ORM's

Just like many things nowadays you have to ask yourself a question. Should I use some nice library or roll my own? I hate to date myself, but a lot of nice tools have come up in web development in the past decade which makes this much harder to decide. I prefer to roll my own simple solution.

This Read-It-Later-list is just that, bookmarks of stuff I intend to read or have read. I do not necessarily agree with opinions or statements in the bookmarked articles.

This list is compiled from my Pocket list.