Angus Pearson
A collection of hopefully useful stuff
This will be periodically updated, last updated 2016-10-19
Machine Learning & AI
- Leaf
- Neural Network and ML library for Rust, benchmarks as one of the fastest http://autumnai.com/
- TensorFlow
- ML & Neural Network framework for Python https://www.tensorflow.org/
- Toch
- ML framework for Lua http://torch.ch
- ClarifAI
- Image recognition as a service https://www.clarifai.com/ has a limited free plan and paid tiers.
- NLTK
- Natural Language Toolkit for Python, got a load of useful stuff in it http://www.nltk.org/
- Parsey McParseface / SyntaxNet
- Google AI tensorflow-based natural language processing and semantic understanding framework/module https://research.googleblog.com/2016/05/announcing-syntaxnet-worlds-most.html
Communication
- Twillio
- (Two Factor) Authentication, Text and Voice telephony APIs, requires credit though they’re hackathon friendly and often sponsoring hacks https://www.twilio.com/
- SendGrid
- Email-as-a-service, much easier than messing around with a mail server. https://sendgrid.com/
- PushBullet
- Push-notification service, as an app it does more than just being a channel for sending notifications but they have a good free API https://docs.pushbullet.com/
- Hubot
- Pretty formidable chat-bot framework written in CoffeeScript (ewww…) that’s well known on Slack and IRC https://hubot.github.com/
Media & Streaming
- PyChromecast
- Python library for interfacing with Google Cast devices, https://github.com/balloob/pychromecast
- OpenCV
- A very popular even if clunky computer vision system. Good for hard stuff like facial and fiducial recognition. http://opencv.org/
- LaTeX
- Very good for typesetting, scripting PDF generation or manipulating documents https://www.latex-project.org/
Web Development
- Flask
- Simple and effective Python backend web framework http://flask.pocoo.org
- Django
- Also a Python framework, more involved but sometimes easier to develop on-top-of than Flask https://www.djangoproject.com/
- Ruby on Rails
- Similar to Django but written in Ruby and arguably the nicer of the two. Has a similar batteries-included approach http://rubyonrails.org/
- Bootstrap
- Easily the most popular frontend web framework, contains good HTML/CSS/JS primatives and components http://getbootstrap.com/
- Materialize
- Similar to Bootstrap, less well known and much easier to use than Google’s Polymer framework for Material Design (Andrioid style) http://materializecss.com/
- Polymer
- Very involved & abstracted framework for building webapps in Material Design https://www.polymer-project.org/
- NodeJS
- No.
- lxml
- Python Library for parsing XML and HTML, faster than Beautiful Soup http://lxml.de/
- requests
- Very capable Python web client API http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/
Data Storage
- Redis
- Really, really fast & scalable in-memory ‘schema-less’ datastore, feat. Hashmaps, Lists, Sets, Pub/Sub, Ordered sets and some niche but super handy Geospatial queries http://redis.io/
- SQLite
- Probably the smallest SQL (Structured Query Language, for relational databases), easy to use, set up and hack with https://sqlite.org/
- PostgreQL
- One of the more popular full-size SQL database engines https://www.postgresql.org/
Hosting & Deployment
- AWS
- Amazon Web Services, complicated but very capable, free credit sometimes available for Hackathons https://aws.amazon.com/
- Ngrok
- Tunneling service, really handy for exposing a server (usually a development server) that’s behind a firewall to the public internet. https://ngrok.com/
- Heroku
- Much simpler than AWS, very easy to get started with and has a Free tier https://www.heroku.com/
- DigitalOcean
- Server-based hosting, rather than containers like AWS and Heroku https://www.digitalocean.com/
- GitHub Pages
- Easy & free Static Site hosting with Jekyll https://pages.github.com/
Hardware
- Arduino
- Very well known and well supported hardware development ecosystem http://arduino.cc
- ROS
- Huge ecosystem and standardised method of doing stuff for serious Robotics http://www.ros.org/
- ARM Mbed
- More powerful than Arduinos, have RTOS features and a more complex/complete API https://www.mbed.com/
- Raspberry Pi
- Mini Linux computers with GPIO https://www.raspberrypi.org/
General
- GitHub Student Develper Pack
- Loads of useful stuff and freebies https://education.github.com/pack