Stuff from December

I can't really give much of a specific title to today's post. There are just so many different directions, so many little things I want to bring up! I should really just split these into a few smaller posts.

First off, my project at work is finally coming together! I am able to query our MySQL database (after much research, trial and error) from one of our programs and am utilizing the REST API from another to bring two of our programs under control, inside one PyQT-powered interface that any of us can use from any workstation in the office! This makes me very excited. I've also been pulling giant lists of email addresses, going to each record and asking, "do you exist here? How about here?" until I came up with this massive list of accounts that I'm still wrapping my mind around. Big data, I guess.

Basic, early visualization of what
the program should look like.
Early. And very basic.
Don't forget--basic.

I still need to bring our email server under control. It works in Perl, which is great, because they have already created dozens of scripts for it. The problem is, I can only run them on the server--I can't authenticate from another machine. It's another hurdle, I think one that I'll need to solve by working with my manager to figure out how to enable remote connections. But we're reeeally close to something that can save us lots of time, and it is already saving me two steps every time I need to create or remove and email address.

I hit the 1/3 mark on my college in November, and I'll know in a couple weeks if I passed a six-credit course over last Tuesday. Sometimes college feels like a slow, long trek. And, really, in a lot of ways it is. Persistent work over a long time isn't really a bad thing. But boy is it good to look back and realize I'm almost halfway there. It's going to be great to get there!

StackOverflow continues to blow my mind with their job search engine. Every once in a while they bug me to update my Developer Story, and I can't help but think that's the way of the future.

Found a great and I think rather insightful video about the over-complexity that comes with hundreds of people doing the same thing, or abstracting to a perhaps ridiculous level without making the process simple. I take it as a good reminder that anything I create really isn't useful to other people when it's hard to understand.

I purchased a green screen recently after realizing I have an entire room of my house just sitting empty. I have a lighting set from my time in professional photography and a few backdrops, but I knew I had to get a green screen when I saw this guy. I'm sorry, but live programming in front of the screen you're working on? That's just way too cool. I fully expect to embarrass myself trying to imitate this guy within the next few weeks.

Okay, I think that's it for now. Having lots of fun as the family is getting closer and closer to moving to Nebraska! Sounds like we'll all be together for Christmas. I couldn't have expected how meaningful that would be at the start of the year. What a great way to end it!

Hackathon 2017

This month has been so much fun! Between projects at work and going to a hackathon in Denver I've been growing in so many ways. I've been learning things about Python, QT, JSON, jQuery and the REST API. It has been a huge learning experience--a wonderful month of learning new programming skills and improving on old ones.

First of all, the hackathon was amazing! I joined on a team led by Josh Kruger, who I knew from the year before. We had a lot of fun working on a program that was originally his idea this year. Essentially, it's competitive giving: you give a set amount of money to a charity of your choice, and you challenge a friend to do the same. Then the two of you play a game (in our example we used Rock, Paper and Scissors). Whoever wins gets the combined money donated to their charity of choice! Win or lose you're still giving but it gives you a reason to want to win the game.

It was really hectic all weekend long: the first night we spent a lot of time just setting up the get repository getting everybody on the same page. When that was done, I worked on the front end and started learning how to use Bootstrap. This was new to me, but nothing all that crazy--I learned to appreciate it as lots and lots of CSS helpers that look really nice! The others had come up with a schedule and started working on game logic/server side code. I also designed the icon theme which was a lot of fun because the let me do what I wanted with it. I love material design, so I made some cool-looking buttons and icons that (I think) worked really well with the material theme. Of course, I was using inkscape for that. I love inkscape and I really impressed some of my teammates with what it could do while I was there. Josh introduced me to the atom text editor, and while I love the KDE text editor, Kate, I found some pretty cool features (usually installable packages) that made Atom an editor I can't ignore.

Once we had the interface working the biggest challenge was to get the animations done for the little game just to show who was winning and who was losing. We didn't get as far as we'd have liked, but we did at least have an interface and some basic pages that showed people the core ideas. It must have been enough because our team actually won! Best project started before the Hackathon. It's kind of funny, that's exactly what we won last year, too, with the Library Box project! Crazy how that happens sometimes.

There were some other seriously awesome some projects at the hackathon. One of those was an Amazon Echo artificial intelligence that would read you recent news articles from the internet, then it would read you a Bible verse that actually had something to do with the incident! It felt like science fiction listening to it at the demo. Another thing was an app to help people grow their relationship with God by helping to make daily habits. It would show you your history and things you'd learned recently. Looked pretty awesome! If they release that app I would love to use it Some day.

On my way back I was able to visit friends and family in Pueblo. It was a blast meeting people that I hadn't seen in months, especially my sister and Mom.

At work I have been having lots of fun working on linking up our mail server, spam filter and customer management software to automatically sync with each other. This means finding an API for each, learning how to use it, getting data from them all then intelligently acting on it. The first goal is to figure out where our duplicate accounts are, and which ones are broken or left over from old customers. Eventually, we'd like to automate account creation, too, and this is all possible so far with the tools I've seen that are available.

Our spam filter program has a REST API, which made things real easy. They even had a python wrapper for it, to boot! It was a little old, used Python 2, so I updated it to 3 and have been able to do everything I need. Our mail server uses perl scripts, and they already have put several on the website. Those pretty much do what I need. We keep a lot of the information in a MySQL database, and I've been able to log in and pull data from that, too. All these different parts are finally coming together. Automation, here we come!

Plasma LTS!!

YEEEES!!!! I am such a KDE geek. Look at this, a huge update! Multiscreen support! Key modifiers! I'm running a system update right now!
https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.8.0.php

Flexbox!

I can't believe I have been working with HTML and CSS for so long, thinking I could call myself something of a web designer, without knowing the ins and outs of the Flexbox. Heard about it before, didn't understand it until now. Flexbox, where have you been all my life?!? Oh, right here.

Combining that with the media queries I am finally adding to my pages, I am finally understanding for the first time how responsive web design works. See, I only did enough to create a semi-fluid website (with some fixed-width elements, shame on me) for the website at work. Designing for mobile was always a goal, something I'd like to eventually do, but it was lower on the list. I finally got to it, and am realizing that designing for mobile quite possibly should have been my first step.

In addition, I've found some amazing resources straight from Google about responsive web design. I've been pouring through those materials as quickly as I can, and am finding lots of things I can improve on my templates. I'm having lots of fun with different layouts right now, and am finding the sweet spots for different layout types. Applying the new mobile styles to the existing site is taking some time, but I am so excited to see the way it will look and feel when I'm done with it.

Also, I am really considering spending $5/mo on a virtual server from Digital Ocean. If you have any advice, pros/cons, let me know in a comment below! Eventually I'd like to move this website over to something I can control a little more. Blogger doesn't allow me to edit the actual HTML and CSS of the site, which has always bothered me. It would be wonderful to liberate my pages! Let me know what you all think.

21

So much has been going on! I've got some catching up to do.

First off, Sturgis Bike Week 2016 was a great success, but I don't say so for many of the common reasons. I go up to help my Dad at the Kidz Zone, which keeps me very busy for the whole week. Not how most people would celebrate turning 21, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I also got to spend a lot of time with fellow geeks Gordo and John, who both have IT jobs and work from home at least part of the time. I picked their brains for quite a while.

Just signed up for the 2nd Annual Rocky Mountain Hackathon! Man am I excited for that. Last year was so much hectic fun, and I got to have a taste of working on a real project on a real team! It's been too long, and I look forward to meeting friends and working on another project. Maybe this time my JQuery skills will be a little more up-to-par, though I admit most of my work has been on Python 3 and QT.

Speaking of which, I have a little game I'm making public. It's nowhere near a complete or even very usable, but it showcases the use of QT in a 2D game engine loop (let's not get ahead of ourselves). I really should have done this months ago (like, in March) because I've hardly changed it since then. It's really more of a proof-of-concept than anything, but it was fun making it, and if I ever need to pick it up again, I've got a huge head start. Head over to my page on GitLab (by the way, I love GitLab!!!) to check it out. You won't find anything else there, though--I mostly use GitLab for my private projects. I feel like moving it to GitHub would bring it a little more traffic, but, really, it's so basic, I'm not sure I want it to get much.

How basic? Well, you'd best have Python 3 installed and PyQt (including SIP) before you try to run it. I know, any program worth its salt should at least be able to check those basic dependencies--perhaps in an update. I've been working on a dependency checker for Python3/QT. Anyway, you can try to get it to work on your machine if you really want...

Work continues on the ATCjet.net website. Today I finalized a nifty little map that turns on and off transparent layers of a map. Check it out here!

I also purchased a static IP, I'm hoping to host OwnCloud on a virtual machine at home. I'll have some fun experimenting, and if I'm determined enough, I just might score a sweet media server/cloud replacement/PIM manager accessible from anywhere! Yeah, it's going to take some work...

Oh, and, by the way, thanks to John giving me a tip while at Sturgis, you can now also access this website by going to zacharyhubbell.com. As it turns out, I'm incredibly lucky to own my name as a domain for less than $2,000, and when I found it cheap, I jumped. Perhaps this way I'll be scaring off less arachnaphobes...you never know!

New Toy

Got a new tablet/laptop hybrid recently. I've needed something that was a little more portable than my current laptop and I've always wanted a nice big touchscreen to play around with. Now that I have 11 inches of drawing room, I decided to make something for fun:

I made sure the keyboard was something I enjoyed typing on, as I plan on using it as a portable, low-power programming machine. So far, so good!

New House

Things have been crazy busy the last couple months. I've moved out of my apartment and into a new (to me) house of my own! It's a little closer to work and family. Things will continue to take much of my time as I get lots of projects done around the house. In the meantime, I'm learning lots about hosting websites at work and using some Javascript on the webpage (without making it completely dependant on it).

I may not have time to program on my own projects for a little while, but I'm coming up with ideas all the time! Codecademy never stops creating new courses that I want to take, but alas, I have to make time for it.

At this point, I'm just focusing on getting steady standing on my own two feet and finishing my college mathematics course on time.  Keeps me busy, but busy is good.

Also got my motorcycle running and am developing the habits of mowing my lawn and taking out the garbage. Like it or not, adulthood, here I come...