Software and Getting into AI
3/8/22
Welcome back to the Odyssey! I’ve had a couple of friends in the past few weeks ask me about what software I use and how to get into AI, so I want to use this post to briefly talk about what I use.
Software
PyCharm
Pycharm is an integrated development environment for python. I started using PyCharm because it was the software I had to use for a school class, but I stuck with it because of its advanced code editor. PyCharm makes coding a lot more streamlined by having intelligent code completion, on-the-fly error checking, easy project navigation, and a plethora of productivity features. One feature that I find myself using often is the ability to have multiple windows and tabs of code open at the same time. This proves especially useful when I am just updating or modifying a piece of code, rather than starting from scratch. Also, since PyCharm is so widely used, diagnosing and solving problems is a lot easier than if you were using a more obscure IDE. The main downside to using Pycharm is that all of the features it provides can make it run slower than other IDEs like Visual Studio Code.
You can download PyCharm here.
Google Colab
Google Colab is the other main piece of software that I use to code in python. I have actually discussed Google Colab in a previous post, so just to summarize:
“Colaboratory, or “Colab” for short, is a product from Google Research. Colab allows anybody to write and execute arbitrary python code through the browser, and is especially well suited to machine learning, data analysis and education. More technically, Colab is a hosted Jupyter notebook service that requires no setup to use, while providing access free of charge to computing resources including GPUs.” - Google Research
I use Colab instead of Pycharm when I have programs that need to run for several hours. For these programs, running the code on my local machine isn’t feasible and running it on the cloud through Colab makes a lot more sense. I have considered fully transitioning from PyCharm to Colab, but I have noticed that because Colab is a hosted Jupyter notebook, there are a few unique issues that can be incredibly difficult to solve, making it impractical to be my main coding environment.
You can check out Colab here.
How do I learn more about AI?
I have dedicated a whole section of my website just to learning more about AI. If you’re interested I encourage you to check out the Want More? page. I talk about some of my favorite journal articles as well as some really helpful online courses that I have used.
