Denver Startup Week Ambassadors Program
Wow, what a week! I had the privilege of attending Denver Startup Week (DSW) as part of the second cohort of the Ambassadors program.
Recent Posts
The Design Lifecycle
A topic covered in my Human Computer Interaction course was the design lifecycle. This process helps you to prioritize user needs, even though you may not kn...
15 Principles for Human Centered Design
Today marked the last day of the Human Computer Interaction course I took this summer through my GT master’s program. Here’s a look at some user interface de...
AWS Summit Chicago Recap
Last Thursday was the AWS Summit Chicago. I attended 3 sessions on AWS Fargate, Canary Deployments with Istio, and AWS Sagemaker.
Comparison of Four Randomized Optimization Methods
This post compares the performance of 4 different randomized optimization (RO) methods in the context of problems designed to highlight their strengths and w...
Tech Talk: HTTP Caching
This week I prepared a presentation for Uptake’s front end community of practice on HTTP Caching.
Applying Supervised Learning to Addiction Medicine Data
I spent the last few weekends applying 5 different supervised learning models to an anonymized and labeled set of data representing individuals of an addicti...
Holiday Hacks: Recipe Scaler Chrome Extension
Over the holidays, I created a chrome extension that allows a user to dynamically adjust the number of servings for a recipe they are preparing.
Writing Useful Tests for React Applications
My team at Expedia recently put some thought into “what makes a useful test”. Read on to hear our thoughts.
Design Patterns: Adapter and Facade
Last week, as part of Expedia Learniversity, I gave a presentation on the Adapter and Facade design patterns.
ES6 Fundamentals for React Applications
Don’t worry about learning all of the new features introduced in the ES6 spec, just focus on these core ones that are used most frequently in React codebases!
Presentation - How Volunteerism Can Impact Your Career
I was recently asked to present as part of the Northwestern Alumni Webinar series. The topic: How Volunteerism Can Impact Your Career.
Weekend Hacks: Game of Life
No, this is not the board game we all played as kids…
Presentation - What is Agile?
One of the missing components from the curriculum of the bootcamp for which I teach, is a discussion of agile methodologies and how agile is typically implem...
To Sell is Human
We are in a new age of selling… at least that’s what Daniel H. Pink argues in his New York Times best seller To Sell is Human.
The Amazon Way: Principles 8-14
This is part 2 of my reflection on “The Amazon Way” by John Rossman.
Presentation - Webpack: The Next Generation
I’ve been learning a lot about Webpack recently and I decided to give a presentation at Expedia’s FrontEnd engineering community of practice to share my expe...
The Amazon Way: Principles 1-7
I just finished reading “The Amazon Way - 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company” by John Rossman. The book was recommended to m...
Design Patterns: Decorator
Next up in my Design Patterns series is the Decorator pattern, which allows you to give your objects new responsibilities at runtime without making any code ...
Chicago Tech Academy Speaker Series
Last week, I was invited to speak during the Power Lunch speaker series at Chicago Tech Academy: a STEM focused high school in Chicago’s West Loop neighborho...
Read By Refactoring - Part 2: Naming as a Process
This is part 2 in my Read By Refactoring series. In this post, I’ll discuss what our instructor described as “Naming as a Process”, which highlights a way to...
AI Awakening NYT
Everyone can see the impact A.I. is having our lives, but an article I read in NYT magazine titled “The Great A.I. Awakening” hammers home just how impressiv...
Looking ahead to 2017
Wow, 2016 went by fast! Here’s a quick recap of what went down, and what my goals are for 2017.
Hackathon
It’s been about a month since I last posted, but I’ve been busy in the meantime! I’ve switched from the Frontend to the Backend team at work, and participate...
Dynamic DNS
So it winds up that the RaspberryPI I set up to serve doesfloydshavezombie.com still didn’t have a static IP after all…
First Open Source Contribution: Hacktoberfest
This year I participated in the Hacktoberfest challenge presented by Digital Ocean. I had not done much open source contributing before, and Hacktoberfest pr...
Design Patterns: Observer
I’m going to read through Head First Design Patterns from O’Reilly after it was recommended on an HN post that I read recently. After finishing a chapter, I’...
Part 3: Zombie Migration - It’s ALIVEEEE
Wow. There was a lot more work to do than I expected to get doesfloydshavezombie.com back up and running. Here’s the final entry in this series!
Part 2: Zombie Migration - Facing Daemons
I continued to set up my RBIP as a web server this weekend: I’ve finally got my application publically facing on a static IP, and the Zombie Dust checking sc...
Part 1: Zombie Migration
This weekend I decided to dust off the RaspberryPi I’ve had lying around and get it up and running as a web server again. I’m currently hosting my zombie-dus...
Read by Refactoring - Part 1: Making Legacy Code more Readable
Have you ever spent hours looking at legacy code - making notes on paper, adding comments to the codebase, and cursing poorly named methods and variables - j...
Life update (pictures)
It’s been a while since I last posted, and a lot has happened over the past few months. Here’s a quick recap (with pictures!)
Configuring the Terminal on a New Macbook
I bought a new Macbook Pro Retina today for personal use, and spent most of the day re-configuring the terminal and development environment to match my old m...
Teaching with TEALS 2015-2016
I’ve spent the last 10 months volunteering as an AP Computer Science teacher at a Chicagoland high school through the Microsoft sponsored TEALS program. It w...
Neo4j pt. 2: Data Modeling Class
The Syndio development team got to take another all expenses paid (thanks to the awesome Neo team!) class on modeling your data in a graph database today! Th...
Teaching a 50 Minute Crash Course in Web-Development
There were only 3 days school this week (students got Thursday and Friday off for Easter) so instead of forging ahead with new course material before the bre...
Neo4j Graph Days Chicago
Today the Syndio dev team took a field trip to the Chicago stop of the Neo4j Graph Days tour. Since we pride ourselves in our ability to elicit information f...
NYT Article: What Makes the Perfect Team?
An article recently published by the New York Times Magazine highlighted research efforts by Google to answer the question “What Makes the Perfect Team?” The...
What is a TIL?
TIL stands for “Today I Learned.” I believe the concept originated from the subreddit /r/TodayILearned.
Project Managing a Blog?
Since I am using github to host and version my content, I might as well take advantage of other features of the platform to help organize and manage updates ...
New Year, New Website
I figured it’s about time I set up a personal website!