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.
»The AGDQ 2017 schedule was released last weekend, and I’ve once again digested it into some neat looking graphs!
»Welp. I’ve switched Todo apps again. Wunderlist had a huge multi-day outage that prompted me to switch to my new favorite productivity app, Todoist.
»Apple’s move away from wired headphones towards bluetooth solutions is the right move. Wireless audio is simply a better experience on mobile and desktop.
»For the past few months, I had the opportunity to be a Systems Engineering intern at Smartsheet. It was quite an enriching experience - I learned an indescribable amount in my summer there.
»Like many of us, I’ve tried to maintain a somewhat active blog enumerating what I’ve been working on, and what I’ve been thinking about.
Despite being reasonably successful at writing posts on a regular interval, I’ve been somewhat unimpressed with the quality of my writing.
»I’ve been working on a configuration management project recently, and as a consequence have been working regularly with YAML. It’s a very capable markdown language, but it gets unwieldy very quickly.
I’ve come up with a hacky - yet, in my mind, pretty awesome - ‘solution’ to cut down on YAML bulk and allow for some pretty surprising templatization of data.
»GDQStat.us, for those who didn’t see it during this year’s SGDQ, is/was a realtime data visualization of that biannual charity livestream. I had wanted to do something with realtime dataviz for the better part of a year - case in point my ‘failed’ Twitch visualizer, CrowdShout - and had just gotten the Javascript chops to be able to pull something like this off.
So, in early June when I first had the inking of an idea to do this project, I jumped head first into the world of realtime data aggregation and visualization, and had a really great time.
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