I agree with this article that there’s a special joy that comes from building something to suit your own needs. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share the results. You’ve got to store your artifacts somewhere, so might as well stick them in a public spot like Github. Perhaps someone else will find your work interesting and useful, not the least of whom might be an interviewer who needs examples of your code to do a proper evaluation.
Here’s a rundown of projects for which I am either the primary author or significant contributor, grouped roughly by subject matter. I capture them here for the value of having such an index, but also because some of it I believe has value. If any of you find such value, would you let me know?
Lambda Functions & Tools
Buy Me A Coffee Webhook – I wrote about this project two weeks ago, it’s a CDK-deployed Lambda function with an HTTPS endpoint that can receive webhook notifications from Buy Me A Coffee.
Temperature Collector – Another Lambda function, but this one deployed using terraform. It gathers temperature data from heterogeneous sources and publishes it to CloudWatch. I’ve also written about this one before; if nothing else it’s a reference example for how to use terraform modules.
Selenium Lambda Layer – It’s tricky to get all the right bits in place to get a headless browser working with Selenium in Lambda. Given how browser tech evolves, I doubt this still works, and if I have to do it again, my first choice would be CloudWatch Synthetics Canaries instead.
Lambda Layer Builder – When packaging dependencies, I prefer keeping them in a layer vs including them in the Lambda deployment package itself. It keeps the deployable package small, and ensures I can edit code directly in the console when I need quick turnaround. This script makes it a one-liner to construct and upload a layer that contains a set of either Python or Node.js dependencies.
Blockchain Constructs
Managed Blockchain Document Ledger – As part of a customer workshop I built this fully-functional example of using Amazon Managed Blockchain to write and read documents to Hyperledger Fabric. It illustrates how to create the network, set up users, load chaincode, front with an API Gateway and Lambda function, and deploy Hyperledger Explorer for visualizing the contents of the blockchain. It’s all automated using CDK and bash scripts.
Hyperledger Fabric CDK Construct – As I was developing the above, I realized there could be value in porting the capabilities provided by the bash scripts into custom resources, and packaging it all up into an easily installable CDK construct. This was my first foray into publishing a construct, and I learned a ton about it, in particular how to use projen to deploy a full CI/CD pipeline and get support across all CDK-supported languages.
Ethereum CDK Construct – Essentially the same as the above, but for Ethereum-based blockchain networks. I can only take minor credit for this one; while I gave them the idea, most of the implementation was done by an early career cohort as a capstone project.
Math, Music, and A/V Tools
Lilypond Music Files – Analogous to LaTeX for academic whitepapers, Lilypond is a text-based markup language for engraving (i.e. typesetting) sheet music. I created this repository as a place to collect my own by-ear transcriptions of bass guitar lines. There’s not much in there; consider it an aspirational life goal to add more (what would be extra rad is if this could be automated via AI/ML, with a tool like melody.ml).
Mix Maestro – I’ve been mixing live audio for nearly 20 years, on both analog and digital consoles. Back in 2013 I was doing so on a Roland mixer that had an RS-232 interface for remote control, and I wanted a way for musicians to adjust their own levels without buying an entire Aviom setup. So I grabbed a Raspberry Pi and wrote an HTTP server that abstracted the details. This repository contains the server code; I also wrote a companion Android app.
Light Maestro – Similar to Mix Maestro, I needed a way to control stage lighting, but without any budget to buy a console that had an app. Not only was I able to get a DMX interface built on top of another Raspberry Pi, but I was able to synchronize scenes to ProPresenter via its ability to trigger audio file playback, which I detected using Linux atime changes. Kinda hacky, but it worked more reliably than the bargain basement light board and the inexperienced volunteers that ran it.
Project Euler Solutions – If you want a fun and nerdy way to practice coding, Project Euler is a great resource (and more fun than Leetcode in this mathematician’s opinion). This repository contains my solutions to all the problems I’ve solved to date.
Docker Images
Buildozer – I love Python a lot, and sometimes that means I want to use it for projects where it isn’t typically considered, such as cross-platform GUI app development. With Kivy, it turns out to be quite possible. Buildozer is a framework for building Kivy apps for Android and iOS. Getting its dependencies right is a pain, especially on MacOS, but Docker to the rescue!
LaTeX – Back in graduate school I earned money by typesetting academic papers for mathematicians (such as the esteemed George Andrews) using LaTeX, a typesetting system built by none other than Donald Knuth, one of the giants of computer science (if you haven’t read The Art of Computer Programming, you really should; those folks were geniuses in ways modern developers rarely appreciate). Anyhow, LaTeX is also one of those tools that’s tricky to get set up, so it’s a perfect fit for running in Docker.
Development Utilities
AWS CLI Profile Credential Helpers – Early in my tenure with AWS, I was working with several customers simultaneously, each of which had its own single-sign on solution for their accounts (e.g. Azure SSO, Okta, Shibboleth). In order to abstract away the details of each provider’s mechanism for getting temporary credentials, I built this wrapper, along with a handful of other useful utilities. I’ve used them daily ever since.
Amazon CloudWatch Publisher – Another tool that came directly out of customer work, I needed a way to publish basic CloudWatch metrics (like CPU usage, disk space, network traffic) from Apple hardware, which would not (at the time) run the CloudWatch agent. I decided to build it in Python (natch), which has the added benefit of allowing it to run on other platforms such as the Raspberry Pi.
Kubernetes Tools – It took me a couple months of regular usage to get comfortable with kubectl. Once I could rattle off most commands from memory, I found myself doing similar things over and over. Hence these wrappers. I stuck them on Github for posterity, and am glad I did.
MacOS Dotfiles – Since I made the switch to MacOS (and its Linux-like terminal) in early 2014, I’ve had 4 employer owned and 2 personally owned Apple computing devices. Not changing that any time soon, and looking forward to a rumored 15″ Macbook Air, which I’ll probably buy for its portability (don’t really need the raw power of the Pro when I’ve got the cloud). When I do, I’ll use this set of scripts to automate its setup just how I like it.
Résumé Builder – An example of using LaTeX and my associated Docker image to build a PDF résumé via a continuous deployment pipeline implemented on Github and Travis CI. The résumé is the résumé, if you follow me?
Software Packages
Chrome Local Storage – Yet another project I’ve blogged about, this is a Python package for importing and exporting local storage from a Chrome browser. I built it to move Wordle stats from my laptop to my phone.
Output Scrubber – Writing sensitive information to application logs is generally a bad idea, but it’s easy to do so inadvertently. Include this package in your Node.js application, and it will insert itself into stdout and stderr and remove any pre-configured patterns it finds, such as social security numbers and email addresses. Of course if you’re logging in AWS, there’s some additional tools at your disposal.
Requestium – I’m not the original author of this package, but found its “best of both worlds” tremendously helpful when building some automation around an internal website, because it let me get logged in via Selenium and then switch over to the requests module to interact with APIs. When I needed a few new features, I offered to write the PRs, and discovered the creator was looking for a new owner for the project, and I decided to say yes, at least on a best effort basis. So far it hasn’t required more than a few hours a month at most.
Other Applications
Garage Envoy – This is another “build an HTTP API on top of a thing” project. I took a Raspberry Pi, added a relay that I wired into the opener, and some proximity sensors for detecting the position of the door, and voilà, I had an Internet controllable garage door. The most useful thing here was learning how to control the RPIO pins on the Pi to open/close switches and read sensor values.
Pinochle Scoresheet – In 2013 I went back to school to get a web development certificate from San Diego State. Part of that program was a class on Android app development, and this code was my capstone project. Pinochle is a card game that I’ve been playing since I was a kid, so it was fun to create an app I’d actually use. In retrospect, though, a native app is overkill and a simple mobile-friendly web app would be fine. Also, this app was Pinochle-specific, but I play quite a variety of games regularly, so a general-purpose tool would be nice to have…
Online Scoresheet (coming soon) – … thus this idea was born. Besides being an app I would use myself, I want to use this development to learn a few new things. First, I want to build it within a cloud-based integrated environment like Github Codespaces or Amazon CodeCatalyst. Second, I want to (finally) learn React.js beyond a hello world app. My domain name is bought (onlinescoresheet.net plus a few synonyms) and a sample app is spinning, all I need to do now is build it out.
