Putting data to work with visualizations and semantic search — Overview To set the scene, we’ve made it to the year 2022. We haven’t quite become the Jetsons yet but what we do have is an explosion in data as everything goes digital and there is this drive to collect information and do smart things…

Using Robot Framework and Python for automated testing — If you haven’t heard about Kafka, it’s an open-source distributed event streaming platform and you’ve likely used it as some point whether you knew it or not. Some examples of Kafka being used in the real world are riding right by you. It’s used by the ride-hailing app Uber to…

How I gained the skills and confidence to take the leap — After working 13 years at two of the largest aerospace and defense companies in the world, the idea of working anywhere else never really popped up. Yesterday was my last day. How’d I Get Here? I’ve always been the kind of person that never knew what they wanted to be when they grew up…

How to pass the exam without shelling out for fancy training courses — Overview My company had surplus training budget this year, maybe due to COVID-19 people weren’t going to conferences and trainings as much, so my manager told me “any certs you’re interested in, go for it!”. I’d never actually gotten a professional certification in anything before so I thought to myself, do…

Step-by-step instructions to getting in on a Chia pool — It’s Summer and Chia Pools Are Here! If you’ve been in the Chia game, you’ve probably heard of the Chia 1.2.0 release which officially introduces the much coveted “NFT Plot” (aka “Portable Plot). What does that mean for current Chia miners? For those of holding on to a couple hundred plots and looking at our 0 XCH balances and estimated time to win that slips…

Getting comfy with the command line interface (CLI) — Background If you haven’t heard of Chia, it’s one of the hottest “green” crypto currencies out there using Proof of Space and Time (PoST). Or as we Chia farmers affectionately call the Waste of Time and Space. In layman’s terms, instead of buying up expensive, power-guzzling GPUs like you do with…

Get a proof of concept up in 15 minutes using Docker, MySQL and Grafana Visualization — Motivation Almost as certain as the sun rising from the east and setting in the west is that eventually you’ll get tapped by management for a report on some pressing issue. How much time will you have to prepare it? …

Using Robot Framework to automate just about anything. A step-by-step guide. — Motivation If I had it my way, I would automate myself out of a job. I document everything I do at work so I don’t have to explain to the next person how to do things, I just point to the documentation and let them take it from there. If I…

A step by step guide to getting MySQL running with Homebrew, MySQL Workbench — Motivation I’ve been loving using Django on the web application that I’ve been working on. I was able to get the project set up quickly so I could start producing Minimum Valuable Product (MVP) for my client, which was great. …