Projects:

last updated: 2016/07/19
0001:
dynaSig: i wanted a new email sig every day.
python and bash scripts with ImageMagick to create a new email sig every day. a one off with some hackish elements. you can read the motivation and some of the process in this blog post.
0002:
kirkby Christmas: our family Christmas card.
a virtual christmas card that i worked on with my kids
0003:
Consumable Price Index: Golang project for tracking price history of consumables
i wanted to do a project to better understand the concurrency features of the Go programming language as described in Rob Pikes seminal talk concurrency is not parallelism. this project uses Amazon and Walmart's api to track the daily price of consumable products that my family uses. it was running fine for a while until Amazon revoked my API key becaue i hadn't made a purchase yet. ultimately, i got what i wanted from the project as now i better understand concurrency as a design concept rather than a performance concept.
0004:
Boids.js: a bird flocking simulation showing self-organization and emergent properties of complex systems
when Zappos.com started to go toward a self-organized system, our ceo showed us a video of a flock of starlings, i was mesmerized. i wanted to reach out and see how the starlings reacted to an interruption. i then realized i could probably simulate the experience. i found javscript code that implemented the Boids algorithm, forked it and added code for explosions and predators. you can see it in action by clicking the "self-organize" link in the upper right of the Zappos Engineering Blog. Make sure to move your mouse around and click on things.
0005:
tri-fi: a machine learning system that uses WIFI to determine indoor geolocation.
originally conceived as being trilateration through WIFI (hence tri-fi), we decided to use ML regression models instead to determine x, y and z coordinates on company campus. a three day hack-a-thon that produced a working prototype.
0006:
presentation on quantum computing/many-worlds interpretation.
i haven't had a classical engineering training, so the whole quantum physics thing was something that i didn't get through formal education. at one point i wanted to better understand the current state of quantum computing and to clarify the popular stories i would read. this meant i needed to better understand quantum mechanics in general, so i used internet resources and dug in. the end result is i learned the concepts well enough to give a presentation. i've given my quantum computing presentation a few times, including to an audience of scientists that contained two practicing theoretical physicists.

after attending pax-south, i was thinking about if there was something video game related i could present in order to go to pax-west (tickets sellout in seconds), then i came up with the idea of modifying my quantum computing presentation to take out the computing part and to expand on the many-worlds interpretation which is used so often as narrative devices in popular culture (including video games). pax-west accepted my presentation and i presented on sept. 2 2016.