For all your Dave Schwantes related needs.
Coding, as a skill, used to be truly amazing. I should be more clear. Code is still pretty impressive. It's neat that we can control computers well enough to do amazing things and people today are doing more with code than ever before. But there was a time (let's say roughly the 2010s, plus or minus a few years) where it was both approachable, but came with enough friction that it was highly…
The internet is more fun when people build and own their own things. And it's getting easier for more people to do that! I've been struggling with the feeling that the internet isn't as much fun anymore for a while and I recently re-read Enshittification which made me think even more about why this is and what to do about it (yes, linking to an Amazon owned site is probably part of the problem, I…
This blog is now using my home-grown blogging library, Postwave ! I wrote about Postwave a little while ago, but at the time this site was still using the hacked together Jekyll-based solution that I had been using since around 2013 . It seemed a bit silly to build a blogging library but not use it for my own blog, but I was a little daunted by the task of migrating all my posts over in a way that…
I recently moved all my small project sites over to a self-hosted solution using Coolify . It was pretty easy and really rewarding! I miss Heroku. I know Heroku still exists, but I miss the generous free tier they offered. This was the perfect solution for spinning up relatively simple, low traffic, Ruby sites, which are what a lot of my projects are. When Heroku decided to kick out freeloaders…
I probably like writing blog engines more than blog posts. Earlier this year I wrote about Don't Break Prod , my software engineering career advice site. While I enjoy writing about this stuff, the original motivation for building the site was to test a new blog engine I'd been working on called Postwave. For a long time I've been using weird, hacked together solutions to integrate blog posts into…
Just what the world needs, another software engineer pontificating about AI! Nothing too deep here, just some things I've been mulling over that aren't worth writing whole posts about... Are we all really going to be staff engineers? It seems like there are a lot of people (or companies?) pushing the idea that the future of software engineering is making design decisions and directing and…
My most millennial trait is that big purchases must happen in a big laptop screen. You should just use a laptop. For most things. Phones (and tablets, to some degree) are amazing because they're a powerful computing device that is always with you, but they're kind of awful for that same reason. When you can always pull out your phone to take care of a task, do your shopping, etc. you're always…
This year I've been thinking more about making computers/the internet fun again . Part of this was trying to use more technology without an "agenda". And that has led me into the arms of Linux. Last year I picked up a Framework 13 laptop so I'd have a Windows machine to play Minecraft on with my kid. It's been useful to have around, but Windows 11 was just glaringly aggressive with how much it…
Nobody asked for it, but it got made. Earlier this month I put out a new EP from my solo project, And Or Not. If you want to skip the self indulgent dive into making this recording and just go listen to it, you can just go check it out . Stereoscopic by And Or Not And Or Not is an exercise in simplistic instrumentation. It's only bass, drums, vocals, and some keys for a little added texture. It's…
After doing a rotation on GitHub's "Ruby Architecture" team a few years ago and learning more about how programming languages really work (and getting a few commits into the Ruby language myself) I've been trying to learn more about building languages. For the last year or so I've been very slowly working my way through the first half of Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom, which has been a…
I like making pizza. When I first started it was pretty arduous. I actually had to grind the wheat to make flour for the dough. Making the cheese took forever. Toppings were a luxury unless I could find someone else who was making them and even then they could be really expensive. As time went on, things got easier, though. I was able to buy bags of nice flour. Cheese was easy to get and a wide…
There's been a lot of people noticing that the internet isn't as fun as it used to be . Not that it was perfect in the past, but there's a sense that what was once weird and quirky and full of potential (while still having a number of rough edges) is now mean and manipulative and controlled by a small number of large companies. For many of the more tech savvy people who are feeling this, there's a…
This all started with my irrational desire to build yet another blogging engine. The world doesn't have enough of those right? I'll go into more detail about the software I built in a future post, but long story short I built a little blogging tool called Postwave and I needed a site to put it through its paces. I needed something that I could make frequent posts to and see what it was like to…
I always forget to move my car on street cleaning day. On the 1st Wednesday of the month I was always scrambling to move my street-parked car in the hopes of avoiding a ticket. Often too late. So I wanted something I looked at every day to remind me of things like this, just a little dashboard in my kitchen to let me know what was going on during the day. While this isn't a particularly novel idea…
So I added a Now page to this site. The purpose of a now page to write up what you're doing right now. Basically what you'd tell someone if you were catching up and they asked "So what have you been up to lately?". The idea has been attributed to Derek Sivers (who apparently is the guy who created CD Baby!). Why did I add one? Do people really care what I'm up to now? I don't know. But I've been…
tldr: I wrote and recorded a noisy, bass driven solo record. You should check it out ! The Infernal Machine by And Or Not Earlier this year I was listening to a lot of Death From Above 1979 and just got the urge to write some fast, high energy song with just bass, keys, drums and vocals. Sort of a cursed jazz trio. I was also looking to push my drumming, which has been a focus this year. I started…
Many good projects come from scratching your own itch. I like to track thing. Over the past few years I've had on and off bursts of focus on practicing. Practicing guitar, drawing, chess, things like that. And I always find value in quantifying how often I'm practicing. I like to know how many hours per month, week, year, etc. I've spent on that skill. I feel like, as long as I'm practicing the…
At the end of October I put out a 3 song record, Let 'er RIP!, with my skath band, Grave Danger . (It's available on Spotify , Apple Music , Bandcamp , Soundcloud and lots of other places!) I wrote about some of the songwriting in this post but the recording process for this record was very different from anything else I've ever worked on. Since I was playing a lot of the instruments and we were…
Last May I got a txt out of the blue from Dane, a good buddy, great drummer, and former bandmate: "Ok dude. Let's do it: Let's write a couple of skath songs." Dane and I used to play in a ska band called Captain Supreme back in college. After Captain Supreme broke up we joked around about forming a new ska band, dressing up like skeletons, and writing songs about graveyards and monsters and ghosts…
If one listens to enough Ruby related blogs and talks and podcasts they are likely to run in to Crystal . Have you every thought, "I like Ruby, but I wish is were fast and compiled on LLVM"? Well, that's Crystal. It's a fast language with Ruby inspired syntax . If the performance benchmarks shown on the Crystal site are even remotely accurate, it's worth checking out. I enjoy writing Ruby and I…
So once again I participated in Inktober this year, trying to do a drawing every day of October based on the provided prompts. I only got 12 days in this year but I was pretty happy with the results. I felt like they turned out better than last year's drawings and I guess that's always the goal. I think my favorites from this group are the lonely space man, the tired dad, and the girl with her…
So, if you haven't heard yet, Eileen and I are having a kid ! To prepare for this life-changing event we've been trying to read up on lots of things as well as asking lots of people for advice on both pregnancy and parenthood. We knew, even before we got pregnant, that we'd wanted to digest this info and experience and share it with other people and we wanted to do that with a podcast. We actually…
On May 25th of last year I started keeping track of my focused practice time for a few things I wanted to get better at. As mentioned in this post , I was motivated by reading Make It Stick and the idea that getting better at something didn't always feel like progress simply because it should be hard. I built a really basic time tracking tool, which turned out to be a really strong motivator.…
I built something! Once again I received a Build Your Own Clone pedal kit for Xmas, this year it was the Classic Compressor . I've been playing a lot more guitar these days and I seemed like it would be fun to tighten up my sound a bit, so a compressor pedal seemed like a fun project. The build itself was pretty simple and straightforward. Soldier all the pieces together. Don't burn myself. Don't…
So this year I participated in Inktober , which is basically a month long event where artist attempt to produce an inked drawing every day in October. Obviously I didn't have the time/focus to do all 31 days, but I did manage to produce 16 drawings and post them to Instagram . As I've been sadly neglecting Mount Saint Awesome these days, it was really nice to get back to drawing regularly. Doing…
One of the first posts I wrote on the new version of this blog was about my genetic algorithm Ruby gem, Darwinning . I actually started building the library back in December of 2012 when I was first learning Ruby and it's gone through several updates and periods of inactivity. Usually I'll just add some tests or make a small update when I have some free time. It's been a pretty casual project. I…
Last weekend was my first wedding anniversary. We didn't really have big plans to exchange gifts but I thought it would be a good opportunity to finally record "Our Story" , the song I used to propose to Eileen. I had been meaning to do this for a while, partially because I knew if I didn't I'd probably forget how to play it and that would make me a terrible husband. If you don't want to read all…
So back when I was working at Berkeley (and had more free time) I decided to formalize the tracking of some of my skill improvements. These were mainly things like drawing, playing guitar, playing piano, vocals, comptuer science theory, etc. I set up a small WordPress blog called Input Coffee and just made posts for every session in order to keep track of what I had been working on. I liked seeing…
Eileen was out of town this weekend so, as I typically do in these situations, I took advantage of the time do some recording. As mentioned in previous posts , I've really been into the Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties record so I decided to finally record one of those songs, Divorce and the American South . Here's a link to the song if you want to listen right away. This is a pretty faithful…
I spend the vast majority of programming time working with Ruby these days. I've gotten to know it pretty well and it is honestly a joy to use, but I want to make sure that I don't just limit myself to a single language or even a single type of language (the occasional Python project doesn't quite count as adventurous). Out of curiosity and a desire to work with a more low level language I've…
So last month I found out that Dan "Soupy" Campbell from The Wonder Years put out a solo record under the name Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties . I was rightfully excited by this because the record, We Don't Have Each Other, is one of the best albums I've heard in a long time. The storytelling and imagery are amazing. Dan does a beautiful job of painting a scene in every song. It's like…
So I posted my first Thing A Week post almost exactly 1 year ago today. The idea behind Thing A Week was to get myself to do more small projects with short deadlines and also get myself to work on a bunch of different things so I was producing something interesting each week. While some weeks I did manage to work with in those bounds and produce a standalone project in one week (for example; the…
This last week I built something cool that was actually in the spirit of the Thing a Week project! Last Christmas my mom got me a distance sensor that could be easily used with an Arduio (which is a totally normal gift) and I finally got around to playing with it. I had originally wanted to start working on some sort of robot but first I wanted to just play around with it and see what I could do.…
Unfortunately I've broken my "Thing a Week" streak due to some busy weeks where I just didn't have time to make much of anything. I did, however, have time to clean up some of the last few things for the RecLaboratory early tester launch . Bobby and I spent last Tuesday fixing bugs and cleaning up the UI to get RecLab to a place where we were happy enough to let other people check it out. This…
Last week was a pretty busy week so I didn't get too many "projects" done outside of some RecLaboratory work and even most of that was done in between sessions at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference . The major piece of work I finished up, apart from some UI cleanup, was a modal to create (and record!) a new track from a song's page. I think this will be a very common use case, so I wanted it working…
Hey look! Another non-code related Thing a Week! On Saturday night, Eileen was at hockey so I grabbed my (much neglected) guitar and popped open Logic Pro for some quick recording. The end product was a nice, kind of dark sounding instrumental track . I had been messing around with a little arpeggiated riff and I wanted to build something pretty repetitive, getting away from a verse-chorus-bridge…
This week I'll take a break from talking about RecLaboratory stuff and talk about art. This week I started playing around with watercolors. One of my favorite cartoonists, Mitch Clem , has been working with his wife(?), Amanda to use watercolors in his comics for a while. They've done some really cool stuff in both color and black and white . I've seen other comic artists do it too and I've always…
This week my major work was around building an in-browser audio recording system. I've been reading about using new HTML5 APIs to get access to the user's mic (and camera) for a while and I was finally able to sit down and start building something out. Because I feel the need to name everything I build, I had to name this as well. None of the bands I was in ever really practiced or recorded in a…
Along with some other RecLab stuff (which is coming along nicely), this week I finally tackled a little project that I've been thinking about for a while. Unlike most of the RecLab work this was much more artistic than technical. I built the first first hand drawn icons for the site. I knew that I wanted custom instrument, track, and song icons so I started out with a small set of 8 (with plans to…
So as of last week I have the RecLab Rails site up and running on Heroku and the audio processing API, Roctopus, up and running on my own server. Amazingly they are able to talk to each other and work pretty much as expected. There are still quite a few things to fix up, particularly with Rocktopus, but it's nice to see the full application working together on remote servers. While the…
So, you may have noticed that I've missed the past few Thing a Week weeks. In my defense I did just get married last Saturday, so I've been pretty busy with wedding related travel and planning so I haven't had much time for extra projects. The wedding was amazing and I now have a wife, which is fun. In the spirit of the wedding I wanted to share a project that I worked on a while ago but didn't…
So most of this week I was traveling so I wasn't able to get very much work done on any projects. I did, however, attend an Indian wedding in Long Island which was really cool so the week was not a total loss. The work I did get done earlier this week was mainly with the RecLaboratory interface to Rocktopus, our audio processing API. I built the interface to the bounce_song functionality, which…
Once again, another busy week divided between wedding stuff and side projects. I spent this week adding more features to the RecLaboratory audio player and I feel like it's in a pretty good spot for now. Obviously, there's more I'd like it to do but it's certainly at a point where it will work for basic track and song playback. Here's a list of new features that got added this week: Visual…
Another 7 days, another busy week. With the wedding growing ever closer I've been squeezing in time for other projects wherever I can. This week I managed to make some good progress on Sauropod by putting in some work before I go to work and on the plane while traveling to Chicago for the 4th. I got Sauropod hooked up into the asset pipeline of the RecLab Rails site and started attaching it to the…
As seems to be the trend lately, last week was very busy. Between work stuff, wedding stuff, seeing a musical , and going to a show it was hard to find time to get extra things done. Almost all of the weekend was devoted to knocking off extra wedding things, like designing take-home gifts for guests and buying a bunch of ties. There is a big list of things that we apparently need to do, but we're…
This was another busy week but I manged to get some solid work done on RecLaboratory stuff. First I took some pictures to use as a cover photo on our Twitter and Facebook pages. This ended up being a big project that involved moving a bunch of my music equipment around and finding a clear area in my small apartment. I am not a great photographer but I'm pleased with how it looks. Feel free to…
This weekend Eileen was out of the house for her bachelorette party so I tried to knock out a few outstanding wedding related projects (apparently that is coming up pretty quickly). The Bird Watcher project had been dragging on for a while so I thought this would be a good time to wrap it up, too. For those who don't remember, Bird Watcher is a system that listens for photos with certain #hashtags…
This was a pretty busy week. I ended up flying back to Chicago on Thursday for my bachelor party, which was really awesome! These good times didn't leave a lot of time for building things but I managed to get some interesting routing work done on the Reclab site. I want Reclab to namespace songs and tracks by username, similar to the way Github namespaces repos . Obviously I also want to use nice…
This seems like a bit of a cop out but when I thought back to what took up most of my time last week it turns out, it was putting together and mailing out wedding invitations. Again, this is sort of cheating because most of the creative work was done by our very talented friend Debby . After listening to our asinine ideas she designed awesome invitations, RSVP cards, and thank you cards. Then it…
This week I ended up getting quite a bit of RecLab work done, especially for a shortened week. The major breakthrough was getting the Rails site talking to Rocktopus, the audio processing API I've been writing. It's not perfect but it has some basic authentication and the Rails Track model gets updated based on the response from Rocktopus. This is all just working locally right now but it…