Cool things I write about
I spent nearly a decade in the classroom and working with some amazing educators. As such, there's a pretty large backlog of pedagogical and education-specific content. However, you'll also find my writings on problems and their solutions related to my work building services to help students and teachers. And, as my role as an engineer grows, I'll be writing more about my own experiences and what I've learned along the way.
Building a Chatbot with AI
Friday, October 13, 2023 at 3:36 PMMy curiosity recently got the better of me. I built an open-sourced chatbot for use with Docusaurus. Though, it can easily be re-worked to take any directory and vectorize the data within it for simple, intuitive natural-language queries and conversations.
Read more →Unleashing the Power of Vector Databases and Embeddings: Beyond Relational Data
Sunday, September 17, 2023 at 5:56 PMGraphs aren't just for your pre-Algebra classes and plotting X-Y coordinates 🤓 Too often analysis of our relational data is too limiting, offering only a slice of insight into more complex and complete hypothesis of what our data is trying to tell us.
Read more →I pay my assistant $1.35 a month
Wednesday, July 5, 2023 at 9:14 PMClickbait? Maybe. Maybe not. All you have to do is click here to find out if I'm really that cheap and lack that much empathy. Don't you want to find out... 👋
Read more →Runbooks Can Save Your Life
Tuesday, May 30, 2023 at 8:36 PMThat's a bold statement, but I've learned to harness the power of writing processes and procedures down into a reproducible and replicable set of steps.
Read more →Little Shortcuts, Big Timesavers
Friday, February 10, 2023 at 3:08 AMSnippets, macros, aliases, automation...all of these things involve a little work up front to make life easier down the line.
Read more →Combining Todoist and Reclaim for 10x productivity
Monday, November 28, 2022 at 11:46 PMYeah, that sounds like clickbait. However, you'll be amazed once you see what you can do by offloading as much low-level thinking and processing to technology.
Read more →One Project to Rule Them All
Friday, May 20, 2022 at 10:15 PMI've been re-reading The LOTR for the past few months and I am definitely in a Middle-Earth headspace...Recently, I completed my last large-scale project for the school I've worked for over the past decade: a single site for all of our student publications.
Read more →Building Interdisciplinary Content
Friday, March 25, 2022 at 3:48 PMIn continuing work to identify a spectrum of interdisciplinary approaches to instruction, I got the chance to build a Mars lander simulator for my students. Science? Math? Dev? All of the above!
Read more →Shopping Shortcuts with Snipcart!
Friday, March 18, 2022 at 2:18 PMI needed to create a "simple" storefront for a project at work while also demonstrating for my students how JavaScript can be used to generate HTML and improve workflows. Snipcart was clutch!
Read more →Wordle, Wordle, Wordle!
Tuesday, February 8, 2022 at 9:26 PMObsessed with the game? I've honestly never played...but I got really curious at the algorithm behind the word choice each day! Check out this post to see into the code and how the "random" word is chosen.
Read more →Books: 2021
Monday, December 13, 2021 at 7:46 PMI read a wide-ranging swath of books this year. For this year-in-review, I note some of my favorites and what my key takeaways are.
Read more →Mental Models from Breath of the Wild
Monday, November 8, 2021 at 8:45 PMRecently, my coworkers and I have spent a lot of time researching and discussing the construction and organization of knowledge. As such, I quickly settled on using a map of Hyrule to explain my views on metacognition.
Read more →Automating Shameless Plugs
Thursday, October 21, 2021 at 6:55 PMOne of the motivations that first hooks people into dev is the ability to automate workflows. The further down the rabbit hole you go, the more and more opportunity you see for making things more efficient. While this blog is a record of problem solving strategies, it's also an opportunity for shameless self-promotion...so why not make it as easy as possible to automate that part?
Read more →QR Carpool
Friday, October 29, 2021 at 4:36 PMQR codes have surged in popularity since the start of the pandemic. As such, they've even made their way into our carpool system at work; gone are the days of shouting over radios...now, there's an 'app' for that.
Read more →Using React's Context API
Friday, October 29, 2021 at 4:36 PMHave you ever seen a 'no context' account on Twitter or Instagram? Unfortunately, this post probably isn't as exciting as one of those, but there may be a few (unintentional) laughs involved. I just learned about React's context api and, man, is it great.
Read more →What's that code again?
Friday, October 29, 2021 at 4:35 PMA 7+ hour drive from Cedar Rapids, IA back to Birmingham gave me plenty of time to build out a game for my students. I'm also close to launching a complete curriculum coupled with features for teachers looking to save some time and energy. This is as close as to 'building in public' that I've been comfortable with to date.
Read more →Stripe Webhooks and Next.js
Friday, October 29, 2021 at 4:35 PMWebhooks are nothing new, but I'm just realizing their potential when paired with API routes in Next.js. For a SaaS I'm currently building, I needed a way of programmatically generating licenses for users after purchase. With Stripe webhooks, it was a snap.
Read more →Modular Apps with the JAMstack
Friday, October 29, 2021 at 4:34 PMDeveloping web apps using the JAMstack is pure nirvana. The modular nature and growing range of services (many that are open source) makes for blistering development speeds. In this post I discuss the creative opportunities the JAMstack brings to building new services.
Read more →Secret Santa's Secret Helper
Friday, October 29, 2021 at 4:34 PMLast year my wife facilitated a 'Secret Santa' exchange. She needed a fair and anonymous way of pairing people and I saw a fun opportunity to solve a problem.
Read more →The Tutoring Bar is Open
Friday, October 29, 2021 at 4:33 PMOver the summer, a group of my colleagues and I read a book by Daine Tavenner called Prepared. In it, this revolutionary educator describes a strategy called the 'tutoring bar' and how teachers at her schools use it on a daily basis. In an effort to teach more effectively during hybrid learning - and for my own satisfaction and desire for greater student achievement - I gave it a try.
Read more →Lessons Learned: Building with LaTeX and Using Hooks
Friday, October 29, 2021 at 4:33 PMThat's a weird sounding title. In reality, this post is all about lessons learned via an abandoned project. In it, I talk a little bit about self-expression and using the useEffect hook for the first time.
Read more →Heroku's Rotating Credentials
Friday, October 29, 2021 at 4:40 PMRecently I created a client site that utilizes NextAuth.js for authentication. I needed the user data to persist in a database, but the connection configuration can be a pain with Heroku's rotating credentials. Read this post to see how I solved it.
Read more →Work the problem: Hybrid Teaching
Friday, October 29, 2021 at 4:31 PMHybrid teaching is a great case-study in understanding the difference between fact and perception. Is it easy? Arguably, no. However, there are some efficient ways to reframe the way we think about it in order to make our lives, and the lives of our students, easier.
Read more →Lessons Learned from The Martian
Friday, October 29, 2021 at 4:27 PMThe Martian should be celebrated as one of the greatest, nerdiest, most kick-ass pieces of literature ever written. For any teacher that likes to utilize a problem-based approach in class, look no further than Mark Watney's attempts to stay alive on the red planet.
Read more →