Blog

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!

Until this point, I don’t think I’ve really stated the intent / purpose of this blog. I’ll try not to philosophize too much on this point, but I think it would be interesting to record my intentions going into this writing project.