Welcome back to Coding Tech Tuesdays 😎! It has been a while since the last newsletter, and we are now back! It has been so long, that we have even changed the color scheme of the logo and website! We have decided to change the topics and format of this newsletter to make it slightly more interesting to the general population. We have decided to replace the “Cool Technology” section of the newsletter with a “Failed Business or Scam of the Week” section, as well as making the “Coding Concepts” section just intermediate code. Now lets get right in!

Coding Concepts 🧑‍💻:

• As we covered lists last time, this time we shall skip the data structures in Python and move into more complex concepts. These concepts should apply the same regardless of your language, and so everyone reading can get something out of this!

This week, we will be covering inheritance for classes!

• A quick recap of what classes are:

  • Classes are a way you can create objects, meaning your own type of data structure with it’s own function and abilities!

• Inheritance allows you to derive the properties of one class in a subclass, meaning that a “child” class derives its properties from the “parent” class. The child class can use all the properties of the parent class as well. An example of a class is shown here below:

  

• In the example above, Apple and Banana are “child” classes which derive their properties from the “fruit” class.

• Remember that inheritance is a one way street. The “Apple” class is a fruit, but it is not necessary that a fruit is always an “Apple”.

• Here is another example of inheritance:

  

• In the above example, the “Shape” class is inherited by the “Triangle” and “Quadrilateral” classes. Then, the “Triangle” class is inherited by the “Right Triangle” class. The other class inheriting “Shape” is “Quadrilateral”. The “Quadrilateral” class is then inherited by the “Rectangle” class, which is inherited by “Square”.

  • Remember, a “Square” object will always be a “Shape”, but a “Shape” may not always be a ‘Square”.

• The “official” term for the “parent” class is a “Superclass” or a “Base Class”, and the official term for a “child” class is a “Subclass” or a “Derived Class”.

• There are many different types of inheritance, for example the two inheritance example we saw above (in chronological order), are hierarchal inheritance and multilevel hierarchal inheritance. We will be going deeper into the types of inheritance in the next newsletter.

• Here are some links on how to implement this in (most) programming languages:

  • https://www.w3schools.com/java/java_inheritance.asp

  • https://www.w3schools.com/python/python_inheritance.asp

  • https://www.w3schools.com/cpp/cpp_inheritance.asp

  • https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_class_inheritance.asp

Your Weekly Dose of Tech News 🗞️:

• GPT-4 Comes Out!

  • If you don’t already know, the new GPT (Generaive Pre-trained Transformer 4), is out!

    • If you already don’t know, GPT-3, the previous model, became widely successful once it was implemented in a chat-format in the name of an app called “ChatGPT”. ChatGPT allowed users to ask any questions or enter prompts to a neural network which would then reply with accurate answers, in plain and professional language. It could write poems, code, and even answer very specific questions.

    • GPT-4 is a newer version of the GPT-3 model, which has now been implemented in ChatGPT for ChatGPT Plus users.

  • The new model can solve “more difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem solving abilities”.

Failed Businesses/Scam of the Week 🚀:

• Theranos:

  

  

  • This week we are looking at a failed business named “Theranos”.

  • Theranos was an American biotech company (founded by Elizabeth Holmes) which which was situated in Silicon Valley. It claimed to have some “breakthrough health invention”, never seen before.

  • It raised around $724 million from investors, before the two founders (Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani) were charged for wire fraud.

  • The company aimed to use a “nanotainer” (a device which only extracted one drop of blood) to extract blood from patients, and developed a “testing system” around that droplet of blood (to perform blood tests).

  • The issue became, however, that one drop of blood was too little to accurately test all of the tests they claimed. Therefore, in order to attract investors, they used fake testing units and created fake systems intended to fool an investor to believe this was a working system.

  • They were not able to produce a system around this no matter how much funding they had, and so soon the company reached a valuation of $10 billion, without any precise statements from the founders. The news soon started to accuse the company of fraud and there was a mist of skepticism around Theranos.

  • The company started to go downhill and was eventually convicted of fraud by the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission).

  • Here is a good book if you want to learn more about Theranos (Highly Recommended by Me):

    • https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/152473165X

That is the end of today’s newsletter! Next week we will be talking more about inheritance, and we will have another failed business. Keep building and reading Coding Tech Tuesdays!