What about the Software?

In this post I want to highight the software I currently have installed on the Mac Mini with the main intention of doing Machine/Deep Learning and Data Science.

Some people's libraries look like this: 


Mine look like this:


I currently have both Anaconda and miniforge python installations. The first one is your go-to for a basic python installation, the second one is intented to intall environments that specific to the ARM64 architechture (AKA The same as the M1 Sillicon Chip). The latter is a bit more limited currently.

IDE:

For a long time I loved working on Jupyter Lab, but recently I have seen the benefits of using Visual Studio Code which can handle notebooks, R, SQL and many other programming languages. I love the ease with which you can switch between conda environments and all the perks that come with a real coding IDE. 

SQL:

I tryied to give MySQL a chance but it was not really mac friendly to install, at least relative to SQLite or my current preference PostgreSQL via the Postgres.app.

In terms of a SQL interpreter I gotta say that a friend recommended DBeaver and I love it! Both the Postgress.app and DBeaver were a breeze to install and super intuitive and easy to use.


Machine Learning frameworks:

I have high expectations for the Mac-optimized TensorFlow and TensorFlow Addons and while I successfully installed their first alpha realease, I have been unable to install the subsequent ones.

However, I have been working more with scikit-learn, which is a general purpose machine learning library. It has everything you need to get you started with Machine Learning, and is very well documented.


Let me know in the comments what you use and if you have any questions about my setup.

CO



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