Blog

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.

Over the past few years, GamesDoneQuick has become quite a livestream phenomena as a biannual charity livestreams of games from throughout the history of video games. I love watching these streams, and because of the unique dataset, was interested in the relationships between games, platforms, release years, and the current speedrun ’time-to-beat’. With SummerGamesDoneQuick 2016 rapidly approaching, I decided it’d be a good time to make some visualizations.

Being a Python nerd, I started my data visualization with an Jupyter notebook and a generous application of matplotlib.

I was working on a script for grabbing recent commit messages from Github this week when I realized that the Github handle bcongdon was available!