Oh, boy. It looks like BART should start hiring some passenger pushers.

That was just awesome. There are no words to describe the experience.

This photo taken from my father-in-law’s telescope while we were camped out near Casper, Wyoming.

I am now an umbraphile.

Taken about 15 minutes before totality. According to our notes, we should “observe animal behavior at this time.” 🤔

A friend of mine recently asked for some suggestions on which language she should use to learn to code.

There are so many different routes to go! Python and JavaScript might be easiest because they’re dynamically typed languages (basically they’re more forgiving with how you use variables and pass them around — it’s one less thing to worry about as you start out).

I find Python to be super fun and easy to pick up. Plus there’s tons of neat libraries available for manipulating data. One bonus: down the road, you can start playing with some of the many machine learning libraries that are available. Then you can build a model that will predict names of Android phones.

I’m partial to JavaScript. At this point, it’s probably one of the most popular languages right now. People are building web apps, desktop apps, native mobile apps, and backend servers with it due to the abundance of tools available. Plus, there’s a really addictive feedback loop with it: when you’re first starting out, you code something, refresh your browser and boom, there it is!

I’ve played only a little bit with Swift. I like it and I think Apple is doing some good work trying to provide tools to help people learn. For now, you’re mostly going to be limited to building mobile apps, though there are more tools being built that expand its uses (e.g., servers).

There are tons of great resources. Codecademy, Code School, Udemy, free tutorials, etc. When I started out, I started learning by trying to build a JavaScript app that could solve Sudoku puzzles. Somehow, I eventually did it! I was pretty hooked!

We’ve been building out a new floor in our building and updating the space for our team to move into. It looks pretty dang neat!

Use this handy eclipse simulator to find out.

San Francisco, CA. 🙁
Casper, WY. 🙂

Did I mention that I’m so excited for this? I’m really excited. So excited. So excited.

We’ll be road tripping to Wyoming to see the total solar eclipse. Apparently, experiencing one is really weird.

During a solar totality, animals usually fall silent. People howl and weep. Flames of nuclear fire visibly erupt like geysers from the sun’s edge. Shimmering dark lines cover the ground.

I can’t wait!

Here’s a random little side project that I’ve been working on: Emoji Say What?

It’s like a game of telephone, but using the latest in human communication technologies, hieroglyphics, emoji!

Basically, you visit the site and get a completely out of context sentence or set of emoji and it’s your job to decipher it. And so on and so on. It evolves over time and eventually you get something like this.

Our dog is so ridiculous. ❤️

I’ve been on a machine learning kick lately. Given a large enough dataset to train with, it’s really interesting to see what a neural network can come up with.

This week, it’s names for craft beer.

If you’re a fan of IPA beer, you’ve got names like Dang River, Yamquak, Yall in Wool, Wicked Geee, Yampy, and Oarahe Momnila Day Revenge Bass Cornationn Yerve Of Aterid Ale. Like strong pale ales? Trippel Lock, Third Maus, Third Danger, Spore of Gold and Drammnt. Stouts more your thing? Look for Sir Coffee, Shock Slate, Take Bean, Black Sink Stout, Shrump, Avidberry, or Cherry Trout Stout.

Naturally, I tried to create my own model using a Python library called Keras and a dataset of 7,500 craft beer names.

…I should leave this stuff to the professionals.

Update: Kaggle has a new tutorial teaching you how to do this exact same thing. Neat!