February 2018
I’ve found that I spend more time doing things than I do writing about them. Here’s a catch up.
In a Nutshell:
- Joined a new company. (What up, Maidbot!)
- Began building with GraphQL…
- GoLang
- Python/openCV
- Ran a Tough Mudder
- Kept working at the Farm
Pertinent Github Links
Updates
It’s been crazy, y’all. I’ve had a lot of fun writing a lot of code, building some cool projects, and living my life.
Tough Mudder
Last spring, I trained for (and RAN!) my first Tough Mudder. It was…less difficult than I had anticipated. It’s amazing what happens when you put in the requisite amount of time. Not even excelling, but showing up every day and doing a little bit more than the minimum. I was able to run a sub three hour tough mudder thanks to that work. Nothing fancy about it. A lot of grinding and running for distance and less than stellar mile splits. Really ugly times, if we’re being honest (9-10 minutes…look, it’s fine). Luckily, I have the advantage of not being a runner. I’m built for heavy weights, short distances, and power. The Tough Mudder plays into enough of those strengths that I almost didn’t mind the ten plus miles involved in running the darn thing. But hey, I did the thing, and sometimes, that’s what counts.
In case you were wondering, this is one of those times.
Magic Mirror
So, aside from my VR experiments, I’ve spent a fair amount of time tinkering with OpenCV, GoLang, and Magic Mirror building. It’s a fantastic ecosystem for Node development, including a myriad of customizable modules and a semi-active community. My challenge for myself was to build a face detecting Magic-Mirror, and upon successful detection: load my calendar. I’ve succeeded in writing most of the software, but I have yet to build the physical mirror! That part’s easy, truth be told. Writing a GraphQL server in Go and linking it to a separate Node App…then compiling that code on a Raspberry Pi? That was the real challenge.
I’m almost done with the software, specifically saving and persisting OAuth tokens for given users, as well as linking them with the facial detection training model. That turned out to be way harder than I thought it would be. I had originally wanted to build the project take n possible users, but with the current limitations of my software…10 users is the theoretical max value for a given mirror. Not bad, considering I might have 10 people over a year. So, I have manually trained facial recognition models and manually saved OAuth tokens. It’s a bit of (read: complete) mess, but it works!
Grateful
Three years ago, I was destitute and without a plan. On the cusp of finishing a doctorate with no plans afterward. I walked away from a career in the opera world for something–anything–different. Fortunately, I found what I was looking for.
At first, my life was a mess. Who am I kidding? My life is consistently a mess, with brief respites of clarity and occasional understanding. (I think we kid ourselves with how well we do, the accomplishments, the accolades we chase. I’ve began a different sort of chase: namely, the chase of knowledge and study, but that’s for another post). Since then, I’ve changed gears, learned enough about code to be hireable, and have since grown myself in avenues I denied myself in the pursuit of elite singing. No one ever tells you about what happens as you chase pinnacle achievement: the long, tireless hours, the mundane’s coexistence with spectacular. It is an odd life. Rather than try to recreate those extremes in my life, I’ve been in pursuit of balance: life, career, body, and everything in between.
Today, I took a break. I spent all day today learning new technologies, purely because I wanted to learn them. Docker is a fantastic technology, by the way. Once you get past the frustration of trying to get a MySQL container to both seed, persist, and network with other containers, that is. I did that because…I haven’t blown off a day on something I wanted to do in months. It’s been glorious. Don’t know when I’ll get another one, so I figured that I would capitalize while I could!
Life continues to fulfil in ways I never expected.
Until next time friends. In the meantime, I’ll be tinkering with Go/OpenCV and finding simple joys.