For those of you who’ve read the blog for any amount of time, you’re likely already aware of my tendency to skew towards data and data-driven solutions to problems. Thus, I tend to talk with people about using data for a lot of different purposes, conversations that have illuminated the ways in which data can […]
Read MoreI’m not sure the power of visualizing data can be understated in the modern world. After all, we have more data than we’ve every had before, and we at least seem to understand the world we live in less and less. For example, this image below displays population density in Virginia census tracts, but what […]
Read MoreOver the last few years, I’ve gotten spoiled by working with some awesome UX and graphic designers. As a result, I was able to double down on my programming skills on both the back and front ends, but at the same time most of my design skills had somewhat atrophied. I’m very comfortable using JavaScript […]
Read MoreI’m working on building out some cool annotations tools for different types of audio, mostly music, which you can see an example of here. Although this is a good step, to really make this app/plugin/tool extensible and reusable, there needs to be some sort of back end layer to store some meta data about each […]
Read MoreI’ve been trying to up my sysadmin game over the last several months using a lot of different server configurations on AWS (Linux, IIS, etc.). Mainly I’m writing this post because I’ve implemented this server-side caching setup three times now, and every time I do, I end up having to go back to the drawing […]
Read MoreI’ve been doing a deep dive into Vanilla JavaScript lately, partly as a pretty overt reaction to the proliferation of client-side MV* frameworks. My thought process is that the time spent learning frameworks isn’t necessarily transferrable beyond some of the high-level concepts they help you solve, things like routing, data-binding, and dependency injection. But, once […]
Read MoreI’m not sure how I didn’t know about this command sooner since I use cURL for a few other tasks. I’ve been using WGET to download remote files, but I recently stumbled across this new little shortcut that should save me a few seconds here or there. If you’d rather just watch a short video, […]
Read MoreFor a recent project, I implemented an NGINX proxy server to proxy requests from a WordPress installation on a subdomain so that they appear to come from a subdirectory of the main domain. Good http://maindomain.com/blog Bad http://blog.maindomain.com There a lots of SEO and technical benefits to setting up a proxy server like this, a few […]
Read MoreThere are endless projects you can make with Python, the Raspberry Pi, and just a few LEDs. One obvious and really fun project is a button operated traffic light. This post will build on an earlier project about connecting a button using a breadboard and the RPi.GPIO library, so if you have any questions about […]
Read MoreGetting Started with Raspberry Pi After several months of deliberating, I finally gave in a bought a Raspberry Pi to start playing around with. Once I found out that it is a tiny Linux machine, I was sold. I opted to a pretty standard starter kit that I found for what I thought was a […]
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