About
What is 13 to 33?
Very much a long-term work-in-progress, 13 to 33 is a collection of tutorials to very gently ease people into working with code, with an emphasis on working with language data in particular.
Why is it called 13 to 33?
The website was inspired by a recent post I saw on Hacker News, Make Your Own Website by Shannon Kay who wrote a HTML/CSS tutorial for her then 12 year old daughter. The post reminded me of my own journey, starting around 13 from editing HTML/CSS snippets to style blog pages on Xanga/MySpace and ending up in my early thirties in graduate school training deep learning models for under-served languages.
As a bonus, 13 to 33 also offers an arbitrary scale where 13.x tutorials will assume almost no background (i.e. it will go through how to create a plain text file) and the 33.x topics might assume basic familiarity with some undergraduate level material (e.g. linear algebra 101, but will offer a quick refresher and links to external resources).
Who is 13 to 33 for?
For practical purposes, tutorials on this website are for people working on endangered languages who are highly motivated to create resources for their languages (from web dictionaries to speech-to-text models) but feel intimidated by the amount of technical know-how associated with creating them.
Who is 13 to 33 not for?
Possibly people in a hurry to get something specific done right away. I imagine very gentle no-background introductions can come off as very tedious, basic and perhaps even incomplete. Compared to say a ‘zero to hero’ course (e.g. Andrej Karpathy’s Neural Networks), the material here are intended to get someone from ‘zero’ to a little bit beyond — just enough to get the confidence that they can, in fact, get themselves to ‘hero’.