Kevin Hughes' blog
Most people would just have a pin board to hang on the wall and track their travels by adding new pins for each trip; I have a custom ReactJS component which plots trips from a set of JSON files acting as a sort of database. The locations on the map are clickable for more details like the place and date. In the top right there is a layer control I recently added to toggle on and off different…
This winter break, I decided to try and finish a project I started a few years ago: training an artificial neural network to play MarioKart 64. It had been a few years since I’d done any serious machine learning, and I wanted to try out some of the new hotness (aka TensorFlow ) I’d been hearing about. The timing was right. Project - use TensorFlow to train an agent that can play MarioKart 64. Goal…
Update - I shutdown and open sourced Ultimate Tournament in 2020. I learned a lot from working on this project but it was time to move on. If you’d like to read more about my final thoughts or check out the code it is available on GitHub . For the past while I’ve been working on an ambitious side project - building a complete Software as a Service (SaaS) for creating and managing Ultimate Frisbee…
2015 was a pretty awesome year full of new experiences, growth and accomplishments. It marked my second year of working in software professionally and school seems like a faint memory at this point. Shopify, the company where I work, IPO’d this summer which was an exciting and [possibly] once in a lifetime experience. I think this kind of post is worth doing to reflect before simply setting our…
tl;dr I averaged every episode of That 70’s Show into a single video A couple of weeks ago I was hanging out with my buddy and we were going to watch some TV. I was making a pitch for my new favorite show Rick & Morty which we couldn’t find using the PS3 internet browser. We did however find excellent video syncing Rick and Morty clips with Eminem’s Rap God. One good YouTube find is never enough…
This is a post about developing my blog on my blog - take a second to appreciate how meta that is. I recently transitioned my personal site from Wordpress to a static site on Github pages built using Middleman . Overall it was an awesome change and I feel much better having my personal site and assets etc in plain text and source control. The transition was pretty smooth however there were a few…
I’ve been intrigued by D3.js and the impressive visualizations I’ve seen people make for quite some time and I finally got to check it out for myself. I wanted to write this blog post sharing my experiences and revelations from the perspective of someone who at one point spent a fair amount of time with Matlab/Octave and my personal fave matplotlib. The first major point I want to make is that…
A few weeks ago in my first quarterly hackathon at Shopify I joined a team that was building a Shopify App to help charities issue donation receipts for orders on their store. We got pretty far during the hackathon and afterwards I kept working on it in my free time. It was a good way to dog food our API and tooling which was my responsibility at work. I finally finished the app and a few days ago…
I was recently tasked with adding Mailcheck.js to some of our production pages and I want to describe a bit of the process I went through because I did some things a bit differently and had some fun along the way. Lets start with a PSA - do not simply drop Mailcheck onto your website as is! In my opinion / findings the default algorithm is way too greedy - aka it will mostly suggest all emails…
I extracted some of the useful code and nifty examples from the background of my Thesis as a python library for your enjoyment. PCA or Principal Component Analysis is a pretty common data analysis technique, incremental PCA lets you perform the same type of analysis but uses the input data one sample at a time rather than all at once. The code fully conforms to the scikit-learn api and you should…