Blog


Make opening your terminal fun

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My favorite and least useful thing I have set up on my laptop is to run fortune | ponysay when I open a new bash session. In my .bashrc file I have the following snipped: 1 2 3 if [ -x /usr/local/bin/ponysay -a -x /usr/local/bin/fortune ]; then fortune | ponysay fi If you want one script to install everything for you: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 #!

Taking the Plunge

Today marks the end of an incredible chapter in my life—my last day at Track Revenue. It’s been a transformative 18 months since I joined the Software Engineering team fresh out of California State University, Stanislaus. While my journey was filled with challenges and struggles, I emerged stronger and more knowledgeable than ever. I embarked on this adventure while still living with my parents, with my girlfriend Aubrey two hours away completing her senior year at Stan State.

TurlockCityBooze shutting down

As the adage goes, “All good things must come to an end,” and regrettably, the time has come for TCB to bid adieu. Due to my relocation from the Central Valley, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain and update the website, leading me to make the tough but necessary decision to close it down. Born as a simple idea during my final semesters of college, TCB blossomed into a remarkably successful platform in Turlock.

First 30 Days of Being a Full-time Software Engineer

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Three months ago, I embarked on an exciting new journey as I started my first full-time job as a Software Engineer. As I look back on my first 30 days, I am thrilled to share the accomplishments and the positive impact I’ve made in my new workplace. Upon my arrival, I quickly realized there was no server monitoring in place, leaving my team in the dark about real-time infrastructure usage. Determined to address this, I spent my second week setting up collectd on each server, as well as establishing a central InfluxDB and Grafana monitoring server.

Twitter Markov Generator

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I recently built a Markov Generator for Twitter in a few hours. The site will look at your last few hundred tweets and randomly try to find something that you might say. It uses probability from your previous tweets to find words that might go together. I built this to take a break from applying for Software Engineer positions in SF. The results can be quite funny and sometimes you might not be able to tell if it is real or not.

Twitter Authentication in Django with Tweepy

While working on a recent project during my internship I had to come up with a way to authenticate users in our Django application. We use an Angular front-end that makes calls to Django. I am going to strip out all the angular magic, but seriously. You need to go check it out. It makes building front-end applications in the browser stupid easy with just a little of javascript know how.

What is in my bag?

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I always have this bag ready to go at a moments notice. I have perfected my bag after years of college and a few months of being a Software Engineer. With this bag I am ready to handle the day. TimBuk2 H.A.L. 2011 Backpack (no longer available) I absolutely love this bag and it sucks they don’t have a newer version available although you could probably find a close equivalent I am not sure it would have as many small pockets as this one and still have a huge open space where on weekends I can store clothes and bathroom necessities.

Settings up SSL and non SSL Nginx sites to play nice together

I learned the hard way recently the importance of setting additional Nginx server configurations when hosting both SSL and Non-SSL sites on the same machine. When I created a new server with an SSL connection and did not set a connection reset for the other sites that were not using SSL I found Google and other search engines were showing the wrong URL in my search results. It took almost two weeks for the fix to propagate to all the search engines after I fixed it so don’t make the same mistake I did.

Moving to Digital Ocean

For the past 7 months I have been exploring the wonderful world of running your own virtual private server. It started when I began writing the core for Analytics-App during a hackathon at App.net. I wanted to perform analysis on app.net and be able to find popular posts and people. To do that I needed to track as many events as possible on the service (posts, reposts, stars, replies, follows, unfollows).

Falling out of love and finding Mac Apps

After years of using Windows computers and lusting over Apple’s MacBooks and MacBook Air I finally got my hands on a new 2013 MacBook Air. I have only had little exposure to OSX when I had a hand me down MacBook circa 2006 and it gave me a decent, but slow and aged experience. It didn’t sway me away from Windows, but that is likely because it was early on the OSX path somewhere around version 10.