Increasing Your Ubuntu Partition (Dual Boot with Windows)

April 19, 2020 - 4 minutes

Increasing Your Ubuntu Partition (Dual Boot with Windows) Why Dual Boot? I’ve been dual-booting Windows and Linux for nearly a decade now. I couldn’t afford a fancy Macbook for Unix-based development as is ubiquitous these days, so getting a cheap Windows machine and dual-booting Linux on it was my best option. (It is a universal truth that VMs are god-awful for developing in.) These days, there are more options than ever for cross-platform development:
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Creating a Resume in LaTeX

December 1, 2018 - 3 minutes

If you’ve ever been frustrated by formatting or design issues in Microsoft Word/Google Docs, welcome to the beauty that is LaTeX. Background I used LaTeX back in my college days for writing computer science papers, and after getting over the inital learning curve fell in love with it. Being able to programatically and logically lay out content just makes so much sense. But post-academia, I hadn’t found much use for LaTeX.
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Writing a Chrome Extension

November 11, 2018 - 5 minutes

Writing a Chrome Extension Or, How I Gamed My Favorite Subscription Box 💁 Like many millenials, I love subscription boxes. One particular seasonal box that I like is FabFitFun (FFF). They have special add-ons you can order with your quarterly box, but all the good ones sell out early. Their add-ons page is particularly annoying, as you have to scroll through many slow-loading pages to view all the products. Often, by the time I see a low-quantity item I want to add to my cart, it’s sold out by the time I can click on it.
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Migrating from Wordpress to Hugo - Why You Should Use a Static Site Generator

September 30, 2018 - 10 minutes

Table of contents Background Hosting Wordpress on AWS Static Site Generators Migrating from Wordpress to Hugo Customizing Your Hugo Site Deployment Custom Domain Name SSL Next Steps Background I’ve been running my personal site with Namecheap and Wordpress for the past 6 years. My site had a hand-coded static HTML and CSS site with standard pages like “about me”, and a subdomain which hosted my Wordpress blog.
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AdaBox 008

July 23, 2018 - 2 minutes

AdaBox #008 arrived this week, and the theme this time was…robots! I loved building robots in college, so was excited to dive into this box. The project I chose to start with was a self-driving robotic car that can detect when it’s bumped into things via an accelerometer in the circuit board, reverse, and change direction. Basically a roomba except it won’t vacuum the floor for you. It does provide great entertainment for cats, though!
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AdaBox 007

April 7, 2018 - 2 minutes

Recently I subscribed to AdaBox, the subscription box from Adafruit that delivers a themed electronics kit every few months. It’s perfect for both people who are new to electronics, and those who aren’t but like the idea of getting relatively inexpensive materials for several fun pre-selected projects. The box I just got was #007, which fittingly was spy-themed. You can see a couple pictures of the unboxing below; it also came with some hacker zines and a lockpicking set which was awesome.
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Advent of Code Takeaways - Making (some of) the Magic Go Away

January 8, 2018 - 2 minutes

I did the Advent of Code in Golang last month and overall found it to be an excellent experience. The quality of the problems was good, although some days were too trivial, and it was a great learning experience for getting more familiar with a language – in my case, Go. (I did about half of the advent before life happened, but you can check out the solutions to the first half here!
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Advent of Code 2017!

December 1, 2017 - 1 minutes

I’m doing the Advent of Code this year! It’s like an advent calendar, except you have to solve programming problems instead of getting chocolate. (Okay, so maybe a chocolate advent calendar in addition to the advent of code is in order). Since I haven’t had the opportunity to do much in Go at work lately (mostly been wrangling ElasticSearch and Java), solving these problems in Go should be a good way to keep my Golang skills sharp.
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Choose Your Technology Community

April 30, 2017 - 2 minutes

Technology communities fascinate me. How groups spring up around programming languages or frameworks, and how cultures form within those groups. Picture the most recent tech meetup or conference you went to. What was it like? What kind of people were there? How did they make you feel? I was using a particular framework and related language for several years. I liked the technology, but every related event I went to was kind of soul-sucking.
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Programming Microcontrollers with Arduino

May 16, 2016 - 2 minutes

Recently I went to a workshop on programming microcontrollers with Arduino, hosted by the awesome Stephanie Hurlburt. My expertise being more in software than hardware, I was super excited to try it out. Turns out it’s pretty easy to get started building a basic circuit – assuming you already have the hardware (microcontroller, breadboard, resistors, USB wire, any LEDs and other doohickeys you may fancy), you just download the right USB driver for your microcontroller and get the Arduino IDE.
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