Somewhat about things.
It’s a living document. :)
I’m pretty handy at building things and I like doing it toward some common goal with other people. Are you those people? Reach out.
I’ve built full stack business systems, APIs, websites, furniture, robots, art, music, scars, a few good stories & a song or two. Generally the byproducts of a curious life. I have tropical island landscaping skills.
I enjoy building software and exploring all manner of creative outlets. I’ve been involved with a few projects around the web and I have startup tendencies. I build things off the web, too.
I’m looking for a new adventure preferably involving machine learning and artificial intelligence. Sounds cliché already. I’ve been exploring that for a while now including making animations using Stable Diffusion, Disco Diffusion, Deforum, FILM and other wonderful tools along with Google Colab and Python. I published some of that to Carnivai, a steampunk circus on YouTube and Carnivai.com. Creating a good product from all that effort proved elusive.
Picking up the book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach remains vivid. More so than much of the material. It was for the online Stanford course taught by Andrew Ng that I barely attended. After a meetup at BoCoup Loft (jQuery) I went to the Harvard bookstore and there was a memorial to Steve Jobs out front with apples and candles. If you were there you’ll remember. He had just passed away. It was evening in Boston.
It’s a tiny, gigantic world. I moved to Washington, D.C. shortly thereafter for a Many Hats / CTO / DTD role at growing and nimble corporate housing company. I built the entire stack saving and making millions of dollars. It still does that. I don’t.
I am not a robot. I’m almost certain of that. If you’ve got a job, I’m always interested in opportunities. Reach out if you think I might be a good fit.
Relevant Work History
Director of Technology and Development at Attache Property Management - Washington, DC
Attache Property Management, Stay Attache, is a multi-million dollar property management and corporate housing provider in Washington, DC. A purveyor of fine properties. That said, I’m biased. I helped build it.
My work at Attache Property Management included requirements gathering across all teams, continuous planning and communication, architecting and coding the full stack, servers and hosting, deployment, test and maintenance and redo it over and over. Backend, data, frontend, design, UI/UX, management and everything in between. It’s purpose is to automate the business based on the ever-evolving requirements of a nimble, technology loving, quirky and fun housing company in the US capitol. It felt like herding cats at times but it was pretty awesome working with people that were excited to build things even if we weren’t sure how.
The backend was coming online as Symfony 2 was being released with PHP 5. Perfect timing and Doctrine ORM 2, thick model layers, tiny controllers and all kinds of whiz bang stuff like Composer package management were just entering the PHP lexicon. Seemed like a turning point for PHP and it was. This was around the same time as the HipHop fork at Facebook so it was a curious time for the language.
The frontend is fully responsive having been based on the newly released Twitter Bootstrap CSS (version 1!) framework. It served a surprising number of public requests on a daily basis for such a small organization. Then again, lots of people visit Washington, DC and we had an awesome product and a large inventory.
It runs exceptionally fast of course. The pictures are beautiful as is the website so web-gawking bandwidth was the norm. I put a big screen TV up in the office with dashboards showing relevant daily and live statistics streaming from various sources like form submissions, arrivals and departures and analytics.
Various systems I designed and built include:
- the property reservations system,
- the leasing and rentals system,
- real estate contract automation with a templating system,
- documents could be emailed, printed or, handled by
- automated digital signatures utilizing DocuSigns API,
- billing and accounting was a continuously changing journey,
- marketing tools allowing members to drill down into client needs visualized using D3js and DCjs
- API integrations,
- custom XML feeds for consumer sites such as Trulia, Booking.com and Zillow,
- analytics including Google Analytics,
- guest arrival and departure communications tailored to each unique property and each unique guest
- operations management including forms for tracking property maintenance and turnover for mobile teams
This served our inventory of well over 300 diverse, geographically dispersed and unique properties in Washington, DC. I built it with love.
Among other things, did I mention it looks beautiful? It did a lot. Still does. It just looks a little different now.
Every part of the business had a piece of that system growing in Some Way Or Ten. I used D3.js and DC.js to build interactive analyses of a lot our data to maximize profits finding renters for properties with big budgets. It was pulling in from MySQL and Elastic Search just coming out of the Lucene community. They didn’t even have that fancy frontend, Kibana, built in to Elastic yet.
Technologies used:
PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, Doctrine ORM (Object Relational Mapper), Symfony 2, Composer, Linux, C, Bash, Git, Ubuntu, Github, XML, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, D3js, Bootstrap, ImageMagick, SSH, Nginx, Linode, Mandrill/Mailchimp, Sertifi and DocuSign integrations, GitHub Actions and a heck of a lot more and I can’t recall.
I left in 2018 after more than six years to pursue other opportunities. Those opportunities failed as did most of the economy. It happens. We learn and grow.
Social
YouTube - A steampunk circus - CarnivAI
You’ve got to love Stack Overflow. The quintessential nerd hub for so many years. The soiled pants of many a lost developer have come clean on those pages. Amongst the best of resources the web has for all of your out of memory and off by one errors.
Symfony Connect I’ve used Symfony along with Doctrine ORM (Object Relational Mapper) extensively.
OpenSea Who didn’t make an NFT? You don’t have your own non-fungible tokens? I made a few for the Steampunk Circus/Carnivai along with some tongue in cheek pudgy goblins and put them up on OpenSea.
Mastodon server on neural.social. I feel the need for a medium ground between blogging and twitter(err…x).
I get on Twitter, or rather, X, at times. Twitter - Carnivai
Skills
I’m pretty focused but easy going.
- I have RTFM skills. For example, numerous of my pull requests are just corrections to documentation in random places on Github because I was reading the documentation.
- Software building
- Figuring things out
- Magyvering
- Coding
- Making ChatGPT do things it says it shouldn’t
- Making ChatGPT bake a cake
- Prompting and animating diffusion models and AI Video on YouTube
- HTML, CSS, JS
- I made this website with Jekyll
Sometimes you’ve got to scratch.
SadGPT is a sad robot.
Algomatons are Amalgamatons. It’s an amalgamation of automatons.
FARTIP Microsoft’s Six Principles of Responsible Artificial Intelligence
Midexclaim Why is there is no middle ground between a period and an exclamation mark. Explain that.
Happy Pi Day AIML Happy Pi Day
Noise Bully This was a big problem for many people in my neighborhood. We lost work, health, sleep and peace in our homes for over a year in Washington, DC. It’s impossible to do any thought work with constant headaches due to one person sitting outside our homes with an event speaker every day filming himself for Facebook. A year long fight for peace in our own homes in Washington, DC.
Wayback
Tag Gallery Wordpress Plugin
Verity Project
Studio Verity
Slipcase Media
Fearing Dawn
Cheesy Meat Cracker