Have you ever wondered how musicians can autotune their voice? How computers can fit huge images into not-so-huge amounts of memory? How Google can know the number of search results when you look something up? How video games can light up shapes just right, over and over? Well, you've come to the right place. This class will take a tour of various computer algorithms that much of modern computing relies on day-to-day. Come learn how computers compress files to make them smaller with DEFLATE, how computers count huge numbers of things quickly with HyperLogLog++, how computers can compute reciprocal square roots with the mysterious and magical fast_invsqrt(), and more!

Over the course of a day, we generate and absorb tons and tons of data about the world through computers. In this class, we hope to empower you with an understanding of how to wrangle that data and do awesome stuff with it! Topics include: - How does the Internet and HTTP work? - Why and how do we use interchange formats like JSON and XML? - Reading API documentation - Applying for API access - Asynchronous programming - Writing and running scripts - Data visualizations The class will culminate in a free-form project where students will use Web APIs to create cool/useful/funny software.