projects #
I’ve made a lot of stuff over the years. Here’s a list of the notable things I’ve made in recent times.
chaon effects #
My latest dive has been learning about building effect pedals. Analog circuits, their affect on signal processing, and how to sample, slice, and digitally modify a signal; it’s a fascinating crossroads between several of my interests.
The result is chaon effects.
Exploring this path has a long way to go, and I’m not planning on moving this into more than just a hobby. I might sell them online or at events, but don’t want to build effects fulltime; it’s just for fun and that’s all I want it to be.
the largessery and the bountifont #
Some things are better if they’re not explained.
thelargessery and thebountifont.
Just let yourself be entertained. They don’t mean anything.
beep-analytics #
I don’t need anything more than just gathering traffic information for web analytics. Access through only a commandline interface is better.
alanbradley #
For years I’ve been using DataTables. It’s fine, it works great, is still being developed, has a lot of plugins, and is very extensible. There are downsides, though. One, it’s opinionated about theming, and it’s not easy to target and modify elements within it to make the theme do what you want. Two, it’s kind of bloated. Three, the useful and well-made plugins out there are mostly not being updated, since the frontend world has largely moved on. It’s possible to hack DataTables to do what you want, but at a cost.
AG Grid is pretty nice. It’s fast, supports a lot of features, but costs money for commercial projects. It’s also kind of overkill for what I need for my projects and is very opinionated about style, which doesn’t work for me.
So… I created a new project to meet my specific needs. alanbradley is a lightweight table filter, sorting, and pagination library, with optional background chunking. Yes, that Alan Bradley. He fights for the user on the grid.
It’s not opinionated about style, utilizing the existing table styling you’ve set, and allows easily modifying the filter, sorting, and pagination elements with documented CSS properties.
The library interface closely matches other table libraries, so using it should feel similar.
tecmo super bowl #
I spent several months deep diving into building software to automate running COM vs COM games of Tecmo Super Bowl, storing the stats of the games, then looking for trends and anomalies across the games and seasons.
The software spawns concurrent headless emulators, each running Tecmo Super Bowl through a season of COM vs COM games, then extracts the data at the end of the season, storing it into a database (there are a number of more complex steps in there, but that’s the gist).
Tecmo Super Bowl Automator and its companion app/API for exploring the data, Tecmo Super Bowl Explorer.
spicyipsum #
spicyipsum is a filler text generator for generating spicy sentences through the browser or programmatically through the API.
tmux-ws #
I do a lot of work on various remote machines over ssh. Rather than juggling several screen sessions on each machine, which can be a pain to switch back and forth, I wrote a program to manage a (IMO) superior terminal multiplexer, tmux.
tmux-ws can be configured to automate creating, attaching, and destroying workspaces through tmux. I have several different workspaces configured on each machine, and can leave them running and reattach to each of them with style and confidence. tmux-ws also supports pre and post hooks to allow running automation before and after each session. Run a single command and a specifically configured project workspace is setup for me in seconds.
Think multiple terminals within one screen, like a remote desktop over terminal. It’s removed a large headache from my project life.
jest-prove-reporter #
Does anyone ever really get over their first love? I cut my teeth in the Perl ecosystem, and (I’d like to think, objectively) the testing ecosystem there is second to none. Perl people defined the best in automated testing, and I’m yet to find a language ecosystem that comes close.
One thing I miss from testing in Perl is TAP output. It’s so clean, structured, and easy to parse with my eyes balls. Since I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time in the last 6 months writing code in JavaScript, I wanted a reporter plugin for jest to output in TAP.
jest-prove-reporter is just that. I have it enabled for every JS project I work on now.
I still miss you, Perl. If people were more open to their new projects being in Perl, I’d still reach for you first and every time. You’re not perfect, but you’re the best I’ve found [1].
metacognition: Is my draw to specific programming languages because my development pathways were formed around Perl?
[1] with Go a somewhat close second for syntax and language peculiarities, and Python in dead last. Python is fine, but I don’t like feeling held back by the things that make it more easily accessible. I have frustrations with Go and Perl, but a lot less than Python.