I recently started my Summer internship at Zillow. Starting at a new company with a new laptop prompted (forced) me to think about the way I have my development tools setup.
»I’ve been using Docker rather heavily over the past few months, and I’ve come to appreciate its utility in working on side projects. I’d been rather hesitant to use Docker in the past - mostly due to the FUD spread around about it not being web scale™. However, for small-ish projects and in certain situations, I’ve found it to be a great way to automate environment production and code deployment.
»I recently updated my Podcasts page, which I started last year. My tastes have changed a bit, and I think it’s an interesting exercise to have this “living document” of my listening habits.
»I use virtualenv begrudgingly. I know it’s what you should do, but setting up and maintaining virtualenvs manually gets old quickly. For the past few months, I’ve been using autoenv to automate this process, and now I use virtual environments much more consistently.
Over the past year, my self-built Windows “gaming” desktop has gone from something that I use daily, to a computer that I rarely used. I had a Plex Media Server instance running on it, but since Windows loves to restart itself, my desktop was really unreliable as a server.
I decided it was time for a change, and looked to reinvent my unused desktop as a home server.
»I love keeping track of my todo list. Lists free my mind to think about what I’m working on, and reduce that back-of-the-mind anxiety about forgetting something important. So, I consider it a big win when I can automate any aspect of the management of my todos. Something I’ve been trying out recently is what I’m calling “Task Chaining”, which leverages the Todoist integration with IFTTT to automate the creation of follow-up tasks.
»I took another swing at a realtime data visualization with my second version of GDQStat.us - this time, built on AWS. Though not much changed visually on the site, there’s a lot more cool stuff going on the backend now.
»I’ve been really enjoying this year’s AdventOfCode, a set of daily puzzles by Eric Wastl. I had some free time around finals week, so I decided to take the plunge into another one of Eric’s puzzles, the Synacor Challenge. It was, without exaggeration, the best and most engaging puzzle I’ve ever encountered.
»Since my birthday is on November 22nd, it occasionally falls on the same day as Thanksgiving, which is always the fourth Thursday of each November. Due to some quirks of the Gregorian calendar and leap years, there isn’t a great pattern to the years when the 22nd falls on a Thursday.
»I’ve been looking for an excuse to try R for a couple months, and the FiveThirtyEight Dataset of Uber pickups on Kaggle gave me that opportunity I was looking for.
»