It's been over a year, but it's coming soon

by Alex

I'll be honest, I've been slack on my blog. The last time I posted was in Feb of 2016. Some people have emailed me asking if I'm okay, others have asked if I need help. To help clear up the confusion before I get in to too much detail - I'm great, and things couldn't be better!

So, what have I been up to?

That's a very fun question. Over the last 20 months, I've accomplished quite a few life goals. To make this easier, I'll list them in some LI's.

• I moved to Atlanta. It's been about a year at the time of this post, but I did pack up and move out here from Austin in November last year.
• I left GM and joined GE. Couldn't have been at a better time (or worse, depending on our shareholders meeting on Monday!). I'm very thankful I had the opportunity to learn about the deployment side of things at GE. In fact, I've was able to transition my local database to the cloud this weekend given my new knowledge. This means my energy usage is live again, and the data loads significantly quicker. Hooray!
• I got married. Words can't begin to describe how happy I am that this finally happened. Like blizzard said about starcraft 2, "Hell, it's about time."
• I built these really cool boxes at my wedding. More info coming on these soon, but effectively, the boxes allowed everyone to vote on questions about Jalysa and I. The boxes were hand made, and built using Arduino Nanos, nRF24L01 chips, Arcade Buttons, Batteries, and some other really cool paper mache work that Jalysa did.
• I built out this super awesome quiz that was the back bone for the boxes. More on that too. (These really require their own posts......)
• Jalysa and I moved in to our new Apartment in Midtown. It's been months of setting everything up, but we're finally at a place where most of our home is automated with IoT magic and really cool stuff.
• I beat Breath of the Wild, Rachet and Clank, and South Park: The Fractured But Whole. (Amazing games!)
• I have rewritten my portfolio in Golang and will be publishing it in the next few days. There's actually quite a few good reasons for this - the current portfolio is way too bulky. I originally wrote my portfolio in PHP. Last year, I transitioned it to Python. When I did that, let's just say I was a bit lazy and ended up exposing some PHP pages as static pages in the Python static path. (Yes, I know... but they were mainly around the blog so). As you can imagine, my laziness of implementing a Python blogging solution ended up having a domino effect on my posts... This means that my blog posts are mainly SQL queries that I'm writing raw. (Again, I know. But when you see me in person, I'll take it in stride). Aside from that, PHP and Python are both really slow when it comes to doing advanced math on hundreds of thousands of data points (used in my /projects). The hacked solution is that I do the math in your browser for some, the rest is done on the back end. In GO, I'm able to do the math in around 15 microseconds - down from 6.8 seconds in PHP and 1.2 in Python. In any case, I'll be deploying my new go project soon.
• Speaking of deploying, my new site is entirely built using a Dockerfile. Isn't that awesome? Additionally, the new site is much more secure and sand boxed compared to the web2py installation I'm currently running. Oh, and code blocks! My new site will have much more robust code blocks that allow the download of actual projects.

As you can see in the post, I've been busy. Very busy. In any case, I did want to provide a quick update in case anyone still checks my site. I'm going to go pass out now, but I should have my new site up and running this weekend. Good night everyone!

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