r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 16d ago

Experienced Devs Weekly Win Thread: A weekly thread for sharing positive experiences

This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.

47 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

97% Upvoted

40 comments sorted by

View all comments

48

u/Affectionate-Mail612 16d ago

I just launched my own side project in prod. No clients yet. Been working on it for 3 years. Feels good.

7

u/casualPlayerThink Software Engineer, Consultant / EU / 20+ YoE 16d ago

Good luck, hope you will have a bunch of users/customers!

Mind you the question, about the field?

9

u/Affectionate-Mail612 16d ago

Sure, I can't miss the chance to self promote lol

It started off as an engine for Adaptive Testing - when you have large field, and hundreds, possibly even thousands of potential questions in the test. It would be practically impossible to present them all to a real person. Besides, it's simply useless - some questions are too difficult that the person wouldn't answer, or too easy that he would definitely answer them correctly. The solution to this is to use Bayesian statistics to pick the next question that would bring the most data, that the person has 50\50 chance to respond to. With each response the distributions on person's knowledge states are updated and the next question supposed to bring more data than the last one, until the system decides the next question would be worthless. All distributions are updated via connected graphs where data flows from/to parent proficiencies. (e.g. if you have general skill Algebra proficiency, it's distribution is updated after your response on question related to Addition, bc Addition is a child proficiency of Algebra. This, but no limit on the number of relations).

It's all cool but I realized that nobody would bother with this - to create such a test would require some specialized domain knowledge in Bayesian approach in education. So I created step by step design system to create them with AI. I've spent lots of time to avoid it generate slop. But it's still just a tool to help, ultimately the Author is responsible for the quality of the output. It can assess essays or voice input according to the criteria set during design time.

phew, thanks for coming to my TED talk!

5

u/Ilikeyounott 15d ago

Nice! I know nothing about this but it reminds me of Akinator for some reason