Acknowledgements
Opinions on this site are my own. Site created with Zola and Abridge Theme .
Dave Raffensperger
Software engineer. Ruby, Go, JS, Java. Cloud and observability. Opinions my own.
Latest posts
(untitled)
About Dave Raffensperger I'm a Staff Software Engineer, Technical Lead and Manager. I work with a variety of tech such as TypeScript, Java, observability and the cloud. Read more about my work on my LinkedIn , and open source code on my GitHub . Opinions on this site are my own. Site created with Zola (MIT License) and Abridge Theme (MIT License).
More Projects
Go inter-lang call examples Web service to securely wrap (Java) Cloud backup script (Python) To backup my files, I made a Python script to echo a directory to Amazon S3. It stores the file size, contents hash (MD5) and modified time after it's been run so that next time it only uploads modified files. Code on GitHub PHP Vocab Memorizer To help me learn German vocabulary in college, I made A…
More Writing
Philosophy “Darwall, Kraut and the Golden Rule” , my essay for a philosophy course where we read Stephen Darwall's “Welfare and Rational Care” and Richard Kraut's “What is Good and Why” .
Publications
Publications Below are publications of mine: an academic paper I contributed to in college and a patent and blog posts from my work in cloud observability. Authors Title Published-in Volume-date Type H. Garon, L. Huang, D. Raffensperger, V. Lin User-Interface-Based Fleetwide Agent Installation With Intelligent Nudges United States Patent Application August 17, 2023 Patent Y. Wang, D. Raffensperger…
Site to-do list
Work on improving the Speaking and Writing page. Do more work on the projects page, in particular, add something about the gem I created for Cru. Google contacts API. Add more links into the Software / Projects section Blog theme Make the links for the different things more visible on each page, not hidden in the mobile menu thing. Make the mobile menu be less annoying on a mobile device by…
Optimize your schedule
Drowning in projects, appointments and deadlines? My newly built personal scheduler, wizweek.com is here to help! It maximizes your impact given your deadlines and appointments, and syncs your optimized schedule to Google calendar. You identify your larger tasks, give each a time estimate and a business value estimate, plus optimally a deadline and earliest start date. You also choose one of your…
Talks
Auto-Analyzing Ruby for Fun and Quality Given at BostonRb meetup on May 10, 2016 . Ruby type_tracer gem code . Slides . Calls between Go and C/C++ (and dynamic langs) Given at Boston Golang meetup on Oct 27, 2015 . Code snippets and benchmarks . Slides .
Calling a Linear Solver C Library from Go
I wrote the golp library to provide Go bindings via cgo for the LP_Solve open source Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) solver. The glue between Go and C Here's the part of golp's lp.go that let's it compile for and link to LP Solve's C library: /* #cgo linux CFLAGS: -I./lpsolve #cgo linux LDFLAGS: -L./lpsolve -llpsolve55 -Wl,-rpath=./lpsolve #cgo…
Hosting a text-to-speech service on Heroku
Using marytts-http , you can easily host a multilingual open source text-to-speech service on Heroku and restrict requests with HMAC-SHA256. In college, I made a vocab memorizer and used MaryTTS for speech synthesis to learn the correct German pronunciations. MaryTTS is an open-source multilingual text-to-speech library in Java, but it doesn't expose a convenient and easy to deploy web…
Tame internet distraction: three tips
Email, social media and the internet generally are great tools for good. But creating an automated schedule for all three helps me be more effective. Walter Mischel's "marshmallow experiments" found that kids who waited for two marshmallows used "strategic allocation of attention" (covering eyes, playing elsewhere, etc.) to keep from the tempting single marshmallow. 1 Jesus likewise…
CSS Source Maps in Octopress
I wanted to customize the theme for this [formerly] Octopress blog and so I used Google Chrome's "Inspect Element" feature to view styles - but they are all from screen.css which is compiled from the Sass sources, so I wouldn't immediately know which .scss file to edit. But Chrome supports CSS Source Maps which lets you trace styles back to their source. In the Chrome developer tool go…
Fuzzy Matching in PHP and Excel
This summer as part of a tutoring program in South Africa we needed to link manually entered names and test scores with our master spreadsheet. I created an Excel VBA function to match the names by combining exact search by full or first/last name and then using character count comparisons and Levenshtein distance to match misspelled names. South African students taking the math pretest The…
Securing your Online Identity
TL;DR: after a recent hack I now use a password manager, 2-Factor authentication and a separate email for banks and trusted e-commerce. An old @aol.com email account of ours was compromised by spammers which sparked a month-long process of securing our online accounts. These are my thoughts. Use a password manager If someone guesses your password or reset questions, they're in. Also, there…