I’ve been spending a lot of time with a five year old and it’s… weird. I feel like if I do something wrong, I’ll scar her for life. But she also always forgets where she’s put something. So maybe she’ll forget me too :)

She plays freemium dress-up/make-up games on her android tablet. I played one of them with her. The ads almost made me throw the tablet out the window. The makeup game disables portions of the game until you watch a 10 second ad (sometimes even 30 second.) I tried to skip the ad by hitting back and…

To beginners, the terminal looks like a scary place. I remember what I was thinking when I was watched developers use the dark looking box with text. It felt complicated and there was a lot of gibberish! I asked “What do you use the terminal for?” And the developer responded, “I use it to navigate to different directories — folders”.

I said, “Why can’t you just click?”

“It’s faster.”

And I thought, how do you even know where you are going?

Recognizing the disbelief on my face, he said “It’s easier to install stuff. …

I’m very excited to have created my first python command line package! I call it the ‘Sensor to CloudantDB Cronifier’. Cool name, right? It can do the following:

• create a DB
• load data into DB
• query data
• list all DB
• delete a DB

The command line tool

To run a cron job, you give it only 3 variables: the DB name, the duration in minutes (how long you want to run the job for), and the interval (how many seconds in between each ping.) In this case, I’m not getting the data from the sensor via MQTT. I’m polling an API endpoint for the…

Happy Thanksgiving Y’all! This thanksgiving is going to the first that I will NOT participate in Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In fact, I’m going to go off the grid and live in a van for the weekend to try living life as a Digital Nomad.

I’m packing my laptop, an external monitor, two raspberry pi’s, one ESP 8266, one ESP 32, a ton of internet, and less important things like my dog, food and gear.

I’ve learned a lot from digitalcrafts and there’s still so much to learn. We just started React and soon we will finish up the…

Aspen, a Digitalcrafts graduate, organized a mini hackathon. Their slogan is: the hackathon for busy people. Cool idea, right? I’ve only ever been to 24hr hackathons; they’re super fun. Every time I attend one I get so inspired by the energy of the collaboration. The rush of motivation trickles throughout the month depending on if the team wants to continue the project. I’ve learned a few things:

1. Keep the project scope small. 24 hrs is not a lot of time.
2. Smaller teams are best. (I was once in a team of 15.)
3. Prepare for demo-day Armageddon.

So a mini hackathon…

Here’s a lesson I’ll never forget. It’s simple — do not delete your id_rsa.pub and especially do not delete your private id_rsa key! That’s how your server, your github, your everything recognizes that the machine you’re working on IS YOU.

I was in the middle of a project and I was desperate to deploy. I was working with MongoDB and for some reason, it wasn’t letting me update or query the database, even though I was admin! However, my collaborate was allowed. I kept getting an SSL error. I started googling why I was getting this error. I followed a…

Since it’s Halloween, I’ve been working on an evil app side project. Since we started Javascript, we’ve explored NPM and Node.js. At first, JS had me pulling hair out, then I found some cool NPM libraries that redeemed it for me. I was like COOL, I can npm install wifi-password. This library returns the current wifi name and password in the terminal. Which means I could store those credentials in a database. But how could I trick users into giving me their username and password? Yes, I need to wrap it in an innocuous app, something that needs to ask…

So far, our exercises taught us everything we need to make a full stack application. Everything’s been taught on Python. It’s amazing, I cannot believe how powerful Python is. All the libraries — all the tools — that I’ve yet to explore. I started making a list of things “to-do” — API’s I want to play with, NLTK, TKinter, sites I want to imitate, data I want to use, the list goes on and on. I feel like there is not enough time in the day. I feel like an explorer in Antartica or a kid in a candy shop…