I had to write some code today to convert words into colors, which was a lot of fun. I liked it so such I had to put a working example online.

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Creating a simple AI that can learn is not that hard. The same techniques that power AlphaGo and poker-playing AIs can be implemented by you.

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direnv has been the most useful tool in my software development repository in the last two years. It’s a simple tool: it loads and unloads environment variables when you move into or out of a directory. It’s fast, extensible, and never screws up, which makes it a rarity.

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It is a weird feeling to have had, except for the election and dire existential fear, a pretty good 2016. On a personal level, it was one of the most important years of my life.

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After I graduated from high school, I went to college like many of my classmates. I decided to go to the University of Alabama in Huntsville because I could afford it and it was as far from home as I could get in the state of Alabama. It probably wasn’t my best decision. UAH was a satellite school and served mainly locals, both my age and lots of adults. There was only one on-campus housing building; most students lived off-campus. Read more...

I gave this talk at DjangoCon 2016. The slides I used are embedded below. Check out the open-source code behind this and the live preview. My workplace recently collaborated with several police departments to build a dashboard showing 911 (also known as Call for Service) data, allowing users to drill down into that data. When I started on the project, there was a prototype written in dc. Read more...

I just arrived home from PyCon 2016. It was a fantastic experience, on par with the year before. I didn’t go alone this time: I brought four of my great co-workers and also ran into a lot of old and new friends. It was so hard to decide which talks to go to this year! In each slot, I had two or three I wanted to see. From early reports, I missed a lot of great ones. Read more...