The full archive — 21 posts on software, side projects, and whatever else I'm into.
What starts as a simple per-hole golf bet gets surprisingly mathy when you start tying holes and climbing the Fibonacci ladder. I threw together FibonacciGolf in a day to handle the arithmetic, added a shared live-scoring mode so everyone in the group can follow along, and shipped it to the App Store. Here's how it works and how it got built.
AI Agent Usage started as a curiosity: how much would I owe if I were billed at list price for the tokens I burn every day? The answer was alarming enough to build an app. Two versions later it tracks not just cost, but how I actually use AI — what I'm building, when, and whether it's shipping.
I'm not really a podcast person, but my cousin Taylor got me hooked on "How I Built This by Guy Raz" and I keep replaying the same episodes. Here are my five favorites, from Buzzfeed and Kate Spade to Rivian, Alice Waters, and Instagram, plus the ones I almost couldn't leave off the list.
My yearly Father's Day note to my dad Todd, except this time I tried to write from a deeper spot. I get into the rough patch where we didn't speak for months in school, how one normal conversation flipped that overnight, and the heavier stuff we got through together this year, from me being best man at my brother's COVID-delayed wedding to our Thanksgiving in Kauai where Todd is his happiest self.
I bought a Fitbit mostly for its API, poked at it with node.js, then got curious how far Salesforce could take it. Here's the easiest 2016 path I found for wiring Fitbit data into Salesforce: setting up the dev app, then OAuth via Auth Providers and Named Credentials. Fair warning, we get our hands dirty.
The salmon fly hatch hit the Deschutes, so I swapped both rods over to big foam dries and went hunting. I only fished a few hours but landed seven healthy adults while the river boiled with stoneflies, mayflies, and caddis. Stick around for the play-by-play of stalking a redside and hooking him on the very first cast into a tucked-away pool.
A coworker at Salesforce built a slick Visualforce page that shows your org usage against the limits in nice gauge-style graphs, and I liked it enough that I wrapped it into a tab and an unmanaged package so you can install it without touching any code. It's harmless and handy for a quick gut-check on whether you're bumping up against your limits. (Credit goes to Jay, not me.)
With some free time between classes, I dug into Node and built a little RESTful service for logging in and out. Along the way I get into why REST is worth it (one API that mobile and web clients can share) and how auth shifts from the old cookies-and-sessions approach to passing credentials in the request header. Still learning here, so corrections welcome.
Adafruit shared a little cartoon that walks through how water actually gets made, and it sent me down a rabbit hole. With the water crisis on my mind, I got to wondering whether we could ever pull water from space, and why that "easy fix" might not be so easy after all. Mostly it left me thinking about living in balance.
I got asked to write a research abstract for the first time, blew way past the word limit, and figured I'd post it here since nobody else was gonna read it. It's the story of talking my way into Professor Kinsy's hardware lab at the University of Oregon and my drone project: bolting a controllable LED strip onto an autonomous drone so I could learn to write a driver with DMA and wire up a new module to the flight controller.
Ever notice an LED fade to half-brightness? Turns out it's often not getting less voltage at all, it's just blinking on and off faster than your eye can catch, with the duty cycle deciding how dim it looks. I dig into the analog-vs-digital trick, share some logic analyzer captures, and a fun way to actually see the flicker yourself.
Dug up an old shred edit I shot on my Contour Roam back around 2011 at Alpine Meadows. I just revived that little action cam and have been filming again at Mt. Bachelor, so I'm crossing my fingers for more snow to capture footy like this. There's something weirdly satisfying about action cameras, and watching this I totally get why GoPro rakes in the money it does.
After a winter of uncertainty and missed powder, I finally made it back to Mt. Bachelor with my buddy Josh over MLK weekend. A forecast that called for nothing turned into a clean 10 inches overnight, and the day delivered fresh snow plus a tight crew of friends keeping pace. A few thoughts on what makes a ski group actually click.
A quick fall throwback to the one Coho I landed all year, hooked off the Florence Jetty on my new Cabela's/Penn surf rod and a pink Blue Fox. Fishing the jetty is like standing on a salmon highway: sometimes you watch your neighbors hook up while you get skunked, but this time I only fished 15 minutes before that bad boy bit. Proof you gotta pay your dues chasing salmon in Oregon.
A quick introduction to Boombox, one of my music things. If you don't know it yet, now you do. Come take a look and fill in the color with me.
On our last morning in Puerto Vallarta, my brother and I hit the beach before sunrise with high tide and rough water, both telltale signs that something big was lurking. Eleven minutes in, his rod doubled over and a Jack Crevalle ran him straight to his backing on a 9 weight. Watching that roughly ten-minute fight play out from the sand was the perfect way to close the trip, and yes, there's video.
Intel's CES keynote had me rewatching one clip on repeat: drones flying autonomously with RealSense cameras, no GPS or fixed environment needed. After playing with quadrocopters at Oregon's CAES lab, I know how hard that is to pull off, so here's why it floored me and why the messy blend of software, circuits, and mechanics is the field I keep getting pulled toward.
I rigged up an Arduino Yun into a wifi dog feeder you can trigger over the internet, plus a way to peek in on the pups while it happens. It started as a software engineering group project with my buddy Jim and grew out of earlier tinkering, like a motion-sensor trail cam that ended up catching our dogs jumping the kitchen fence when we were gone. Here's how the idea came together.
Three days of storm riding deep powder at Mt. Bachelor, from bottomless Utah-blower turns on Friday to a side-country mission up Cows Face on fresh A/T setups. I get into the snow pit I dug to check stability, the trackless pitches my buddy and I split, and the out-of-bounds call near the end that turned into a mistake.
I got curious about the Arduino Yun, a credit-card-sized board that crams an Arduino Uno, wifi, and a little Linux computer into one package, with an SD slot, micro USB, and ethernet. My take: it's a slick all-in-one for hobbyists, a bit pricey, and held back by no HDMI and that finicky onboard storage you're warned not to lean on. I'm ordering one anyway, so here's why I think 2014 is the year these chips all move into the same neighborhood.
Intel came to my CS department at U of O to show off the Edison, and honestly it blew my mind: an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi crammed onto a board the size of an SD card, that also works as one. I was already deep in Arduino tinkering, so getting to hold this thing made me start dreaming about all the wifi-connected hardware projects it could unlock, starting with a flashlight and an iPhone.
