The journey into world wide web

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever”

– Steve Jobs

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1990 he would have never foreseen the great dot-com-bubble that would sweep the world over, just 5 years later, in a scale that was unparalleled in history until then.
Leave aside the great information age it has brought with it; never has history seen a more easy way for common man to reach new heights. Lots of empires sprung up. Some thrived. Some kissed the dust. But it taught everyone to dream.

While this gold rush was happening there was a group of people out there who were busy selling shovels - Web Developers.
They were busy building the foundations - making it strong and a thing of beauty. Innovations. Complexities.

In 2018, when we talk about the developement scenario it is not at all similar to the way it started out. Just like the lifestyle back then, the developement was simple too. You didn’t have much choices and thus were happy in general. Time changed, so did development. Today you have a plethora of choices - from css frameworks to javascript libraries, MVC patterns, bundlers, DBs, and even editors. I’m not saying it’s bad. But it would overwhelm anyone who really wants to start somewhere.

This may sound as a cliche but truth is to be told "To do anything in your life, you need passion".

As for me, I started web development because I was amazed by the way websites work and I wanted to know how people built these amazing things.I had to start somewhere and just like anyone else, I typed these magic words into google: how to learn web development. Lots of information. But the important thing was to start. Started out by completing the course offered by Codeacademy. It was really beginner-friendly and encapsulated lots of big complex things away so as not to dazzle a novice. I was hooked.

Lots of tutorials and experiments later I felt like I owned a superpower now. Boy was I mistaken. The world of web development changed every single day. There are a ton of libraries and frameworks out there that you may have never heard of. And most probably never will. The realisation came later - to not know something is completely fine. The more quicker you accept it, the better.

The power resides in your ability to understand what a problem is, and to know what to search for.

Build your own Recommendation System

Amazon has it. Google has it. Spotify has it. Almost all companies that care about user experiene has it. Yes! Recommendation systems are the heart of today’s mainstream applications. You need the user to come back over, again and again? Use recommendations. You need to sell more copies of your product? Use recommendations.

The following tutorial is based on this amazing work.

What we are building:

A basic music recommendation system.

Needs:

• Python 3