Recent content on Mario Sanchez Carrion
Made with : R 
 Video overview: ( https://youtu.be/XwbC2oFqorQ ) 
 
 
 This is a program that makes use of the tidiverse , dplyr , ggplot2 , maps and sf R packages to build a visualization tool that shows the observations of a particular bird species in a US map. 
 These are the functions that were created: 
 bd_dot_file 
 Name : bd_dot_file 
 Description : Prepares…
Made with : SQLite 
 Video overview: ( https://youtu.be/0tICUfe6Nbg ) 
 Scope 
 The database for the Soccer Shirt Store includes all entities necessary to facilitate the process of tracking customer orders and inventory available for a chain of sports retail stores that for now only sells soccer shirts. It also enables the generation of useful reports to run the business, as detailed…
Projects 
 
 Plotting Bird Observations on a Map with R 
 Sales and Inventory System with SQL 
 RSVP App with Bottle and SQLite 
 Pynt: Static Site Generator with Python 
 Auction Site With Django 
 Moon Phase With JavaScript 
 Dark Theme Switch with JavaScript 
 ECommerce Front End with Flask and SQL 
 Twitter Clone with React 
 Bootstrap Real Estate…

 My name is Mario Sanchez Carrion and I’m an independent math teacher and a hobbyist computer programmer. 
 Since retiring from the corporate world in 2022 I’ve been experimenting with location independence, maintaining a base in Miami, FL, but living in different cities for several weeks to several months. The cities where I feel most at home are Paris (FR), Raleigh, NC and…

 👋 Hi, I’m Mario. After 30 years in the corporate world, I am now pursuing my passion for math and teaching by helping students understand the basic concepts of algebra, geometry, trigonometry and other common math topics. I am also working with students who want to prepare for the math section of the SAT , ACT , and ASVAB tests. 
 My experience in teaching comes not from a traditional…
I am now focusing on my Math tutoring practice, helping students with Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry and SAT/ACT Math preparation. 
 I am also practicing with R , a programming language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. 
 Not long ago I also took birding as a hobby. I became a member of the Tropical Audubon Society and participate in several birding expeditions…
Important : This article assumes that you are already familiar with the basics of programming with Python. 
 
 In high school algebra you will regularly need to solve linear equations, quadriatic equations, or equations of a higher power, as well as systems of equations. 
 While it is important for you to learn how to solve them algebraically, you can also use the power of computers,…

 I have been experimenting with location independence since 2022, staying for periods of several weeks to several months in different places. I usually take pictures of the places I go and post a few of them here. 
 All pictures were taken by me using my phone. The picture gallery is made with JavaScript and some CSS. If you want to build a similar gallery for your site here's how to do…
Made with : Python and SQLite 
 Source Files 
 This is a simple web application that let’s users rsvp for a party, indicating their name, number of people coming with them, and what will they bring. 
 The app implements routes using the Bottle web framework, following the MVC design pattern . 
 Routes 
 
 
 / (or index route): This route renders the entry point to…

 
 Computer : HP Pavilion x360 with a 14" display. It has an Intel Core i5-1035G1 Processor, 8GB SDRAM, and 256 SSD. This is a great laptop for the price. I don’t mind the smaller screen since my intention is to maximize portability (while at home, I do most of my web development work in a large monitor anyway). 
 
 
 Operating System : Ubuntu 20.04 LTS . Some of the…
Made with : Python 
 Source Files | Live Demo 
 
 
 Description: 
 Pynt is a pint-sized static site generator with basic blog capabilities written in Python in less than 100 lines of code. It doesn’t use any web framework, just pure Python functionality. 
 Why 
 A few years back I became familiar with static site generators (there are many of them ). I tried…
Made with : Python 
 Source Files Live Demo 
 This app was my implementation of CS50W ’s Project 2, which involves Django, SQL, Models and Migrations. 
 
 Here are the specs: 
 
 
 Models : Your application should have at least three models in addition to the User model: one for auction listings, one for bids, and one for comments made on auction listings. It’s up…
Made with : Python 
 Source Files 
 
 This project is part of the CS50W Web Applications with Python and JavaScript online course. 
 It doesn’t use models, just views and templates, to build a wiki page. The program reads through a folder filled with entries written in Markdown, converts them to HTML and sends the HTML to Django templates. 
 The specs call for: 
…
Made with : Python 
 Source Files 
 This is a practice project in Python. We will create a Python program to shorten URLs using Bitly ’s API . 
 Of course we can always shorten URLs directly from the Bitly page, but we don’t want to do that. We want to be able to do it straight from our computer’s command line, and to store each URL key value pair (long url, short…
Made with : JavaScript 
 Source Files | Live Demo 
 I wanted a simple web page to show today’s date, moon phase and percentage illumination, plus a nice picture of the moon. 
 
 My first step was to find an API that I could call to retrieve today’s moon phase and illumination. After some research I found the Farmsense moon phase API. The API accepts a date as a…

 Made with : Python 
 Source Files Live Demo 
 This is a practice project in Python using the Covid package, which lets us retrieve information about Covid-19 from John Hopkins API. 
 The application.py file contains our program logic. 
 We start by importing the package that will provide us with the data: 
 from covid import Covid 
 The data comes in the form of a…
Made with : Node and Express 
 Source Files 
 
 This is a simple server-side application made with Node and Express. 
 
 Instead of using a more advance data base, we used a super simple CSV file to store our data, and took advantage of the fs Node module and the neat-csv package to convert string information from our CSV database into an array of objects that we can then pass…

 The Psychology of Money , by Morgan Housel, is probably the first book I would read. More than short term tactics, it deals with the mindset we need to develop to acquire wealth. 
 I have included the most relevant quotes from the book below, although I highly recommend that you read the whole book. 
 
 “The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to…
Made with : JavaScript 
 Source Files | Live Demo 
 
 
 JavaScript program to choose only the pizzas with the ingredientes you want. 
 Select the ingredients you don’t want from a list of options and hit the submit button. The program will only show you pizzas with ingredients you want. 
 The script uses a plain vanilla XMLHttpRequest to bring the pizza information…
Made with : Node and Express 
 Source Files | Live Demo 
 
 I got the inspiration for this project from this post in Willem Middelkoop’s blog. While Willem’s post went through the basic process, it didn’t provide detaied instructions on how to make this work on an actual server, or how to interact with the payment platform’s API. That’s when I went online…

 I’ve been writing often on this site lately, so I decided to listen to the audio version of On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser . The book was highly recommended by Derek Sivers . More than a collection of grammatical rules and techniques, On Writing Well is a common sense guide on how to keep your writing concise and engaging. Here are the…
Made with : Node and Express 
 Source Files Live Demo 
 Source Files | Live Demo 
 
 Before we go to our example site, let’s talk about Express: 
 Express is a web framework usually paired with Node. It is a light weight tool that makes it easy to build dynamic web applications. 
 Since Express is made with JavaScript, you can install it directly from NPM . Once you…
Made with : JavaScript 
 Source Files | Live Demo 
 We will implement a dark theme selector for our site that visitors can activate by clicking on an icon. We will discuss what we have to do to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files that make up our site to make that happen. 
 The HTML 
 <!--DOCTYPE--> 
 < html > 
 < head > 
 < script src = 'script.js' ></ script > 
 <…
Made with : JavaScript 
 Source Files Live Demo 
 Update : The API I was using for this project is not in business any more, so the demo will not work. I am looking for a new API to adapt this project and make it work again. 
 
 We will create a mobile web app that will display the current exchange of a basket of currencies versus the US dollar. Besides the current rate we also…
Made with : Python 
 Source Files 
 
 With this simple app we can type the name (or part of the name) of an airline in a form, and upon Submit we get a list of airlines that match our input followed by its IATA symbol. For example, you can type “american” in the search box: 
 
 If you then click Submit ; the result will be a list of all the airlines that have “american” in…
Made with : JavaScript 
 
 I wanted to post a few pictures from my trips and other activities here in the site. Looking around the web for ideas I settled on a simple square format for the pictures, with a subtle frame and a gray transparent rectangle for the description placed at the bottom of the photo: 
 University of Miami 
 These are the style declarations for the photos:

 
 PAW (prodigious accumulator of wealth) is someone who has achieved high net worth . UAW (under accumulator of wealth) is someone with low or negative net worth. PAWs may have normal or even below average income. UAW may have high income. It’s not how much you make: it’s how much you keep . 
 
 
 PAWs live below their means. 
 
 
 PAWs have budgets…
Made with : React 
 Source Files | Live Demo 
 Update : As of May 9, 2020, the API I was using to fecth the stock info has gone out of business so the values you will get in the Demo are all null. The functionality of the app, though, remains correct. I will update as soon as I find another free API. 
 Objective 
 To build a stock info app using React. 
 What we wanted to…

 Made with : JavaScript | CSS 
 Source Files | Live Demo 
 I started with progressbar.js by Kimmo Brunfeldt, which does most of the heavy lifting. You can add it your project by including a link near your closing body tag to the CDN repository where progressbar.js resides. 
 I used Progressbar’s circle as the base for my project (you can use other geometrical shapes), which…
Made with : Python, SQLite and JavaScript 
 Source Files 
 This app was my CS50x final project. 
 The app loads a gallery of soccer shirts that includes: image, description, price, and a small form to add item to cart. The shirt info is stored in a SQLite database and is displayed using Bootstrap’s card class. 
 
 The app includes a series of filters implemented using…

 Made with : ReactJS 
 Source Files | Live Demo 
 This front end project is inspired in a minimal version of Twitter. We use React components and JavaScript ES6 classes, and put into practice the concept of state. It also uses JSX syntax. 
 We start by running Create React App , which provides the scaffolding for our site and performs all the lifting so that we can focus on the…

 
 
 Made with : HTML | CSS | JavaScript 
 Source Files | Live Demo 
 The objective was to design a clean, efficient, and fully responsive website for a real estate investments business. It needed to clearly describe what the company did, and include easy to follow call-to-actions throughout the site. 
 It was made using the Agency template for Bootstrap, a fully…

 Ego Is The Enemy , by Ryan Holiday, came highly recommended by Derek Sivers . It explores how remaining humble and embracing a learning mindset can lead to success. Here are my favorite highlights: 
 “If ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us.”…

 Made with : HTML | CSS JavaScript 
 Source Files Live Demo 
 Project involved creating the calculator interface with HTML and CSS and then adding fuctionality through event handlers and callback functions. It works fine, with some improvements yet to be made, like limiting the display to a certain number of digits so that they fit in the calculator window when the number is too…

 More than just a productivity book, The Compound Effect , by Darren Hardy, deals with the importance of developing good habits. It is easy to read and full of valuable insights and actionable steps. 
 Here are my most important takeaways : 
 Massive results take time 
 Whether we are trying to build wealth, lose weight, learn a new language or any other worthwhile pursuit,…

 A few weeks ago I was rehearsing a presentation, and one of my co-workers recorded it on video. What an eye opener! I was terrible… 
 After getting some honest feedback and a few tips, and going through the presentation for five or six more times, my delivery got better, to the point that I almost didn’t have to cringe when I watched it. 
 As if fate had it, a few days…

 Made with : Angular 
 Source Files Live Demo 
 A few weeks ago I came across the concept of SPA , or Single Page Application , and learned that they can be created with Angular.js , a JavaScript library supported by Google. 
 Most definitions of SPA you can find online are very technical and full of jargon, so perhaps the best way a newbie web developer like me can understand it…

 Finally managed to read A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine. The book came highly recommended by Derek Sivers, an artist and writer that I respect and identify with due to our almost identical world views. 
 I had only a vague idea of what stoicism was prior to reading the book, but based on my little knowledge I suspected that I have been…

 Anything You Want by Derek Sivers is a powerful little book offering valuable uncommon sense advice on how to approach business in alignment with your values and beliefs. In about an hour reading time, Derek Sivers candidly tells us everything he learned from founding, operating and selling CD Baby, the business he stumbled upon when he decided to help fellow musicians sell their work on the…

 I decided to read Work The System when it was highly recommended by two respected business thinkers that I follow online: Josh Kaufman and Sebastian Marshall . Also, because I’ve been very busy lately and a deep understanding of systems, standardization and automation will bring more control, less stress, and more time for value-adding activities like thinking, strategizing, and…

 Sebastian Marshall put together this book in a week (mostly from blog content) as a dare to an old-school publisher who had offered to publish it but had been dragging the project for months. As a result, some passages may sound repetitive and there are several grammatical and spelling errors, but don’t get fooled: there is gold on those pages if you just can see beyond that. 
…

 Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is one of the best business books I’ve ever read. The authors take every single piece of business conventional wisdom and shatters them to pieces. 
 As the books back cover says: ASAP is poison, underdo the competition, meetings are toxic, fire the workaholics, pick a fight, planning is guessing. All counterintuitive advice, but…