I had the idea for this site around 5 years ago (I think I first registered the domain in late 2017) while I was working as a software engineer and partway through a master’s degree in data science. I was convinced it was going to be a data science blog where I’d show off all the neat projects I completed, post tutorials, and all the other cool things people do on data science blogs.

This caught me by surprise at work this week, so I thought I’d make a post about it to hopefully help others avoid the same frustration. I’m very new to using AWS, so if I’m doing something horribly wrong, please let me know! When running commands in AWS, it is common to assume a role which has permissions to perform a certain action rather than performing that action as your user.

At some point in the last few years, I became interested in self-hosted services, probably via r/homelab and r/homeserver. It serves two purposes: a hobby and a way to have useful things with less reliance on big tech companies. Because it’s a hobby, setting up new services or improving my environment don’t always feel like work. It’s frustrating when there are issues, but the process of troubleshooting and getting the whole setup working is mostly fun.

I’ve never been a big fan of spending a lot of time outside of work programming, mostly because I don’t subscribe to the idea that a developer needs to eat, sleep, and breathe code to have a successful career. However, I have on occasion started a project that sounded interesting to me. To date, I have never finished one of those projects, so here I present the Hall of Dead Projects: ideas I was once excited about, but not actually excited enough to stick with building them.

Driving home after Christmas, my wife and I had a quick year in review discussion and I thought it would be good for me to document a look back at the past year. Here is a quick rundown of what this year looked like for me and a short list of goals for 2022. Work I started a new job in November working at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, working on tools used for genomics research.

Hello! I have wanted to start a blog for a long time, to have a place to pratice my writing, put my thoughts, and share things I’ve worked on. I don’t know yet exactly what I"ll post or how frequently, but this is the start. Posts will mostly be related to software engineering, data science, and other technology. Data related projects will intersect with my other hobbies in music and motorsports.