Wow.

“Written on January 18, 2022”

It’s been that long since my last blog post. 3.5 years, and what is there to update the Internet on?

I’m still an Analyst Programmer with the State of Alaska. I’ve certainly learned a lot about Fullstack .NET Development, Vue.js, SQL Server, and Blazor. I’ve learned about integrating Excel Sheets into read/write processes. I’ve learned a lot about Data Structures and Algorithms, Clean Code principles and Application architecture. And I’ve finished a college course or two!

Life outside of work? I started singing and playing guitar for people again. What started as some Open Mics at a local Vintage clothing store turned into a handful of paid gigs, lots of friends made and lots of memories. I hadn’t performed for an audience since the COVID years (remember that?) so that’s been huge. I’ve even become friends with one of the local music stores and demo some of their guitars for their Instagram page! Getting encouraged to play $3000 instruments? No complaints here.

And through Music, I also found my community here in Alaska. There’s a family I’ve become quite close to that I play music with every week. And when it wasn’t music, there was fishing, golf, or trivia nights. It’s been such a blessing to get adopted by an Alaskan family and shown the true Wilderness that Alaska has to offer.

I’ve also visited my relatives in Colorado a few times. I have a niece that is a few years old now, and she’s the sweetest thing. It’s also nice to visit the parents, my brother, and my grandma.

And, what of the usual coding projects?

Well, I’ve certainly been very excited about the recent developments in the world of AI. I participated in the Microsoft Build conference and was pretty impressed at the way developers are now using AI to generate code files, prototype simple app proof-of-concepts, and even assist in debugging code.

However, one of the things I’m most excited about is Notion. It’s basically a minimal page builder with a lot of great functionality. It’s pretty good for laying out content in a written-format. However, there is also tabular data, checkbox to-do lists, user mentions, and input forms! The real power comes from this inter-component functionality.

The really amazing thing is the AI text prompt. I asked Notion to create a data table for a monthly spending tracker and it did a pretty great job in less than a minute.

AI definitely saves so much time doing the rote, tedious work we all hate slogging through. I don’t think AI is replacing jobs anytime soon, if anything it’s making people so much more capable and productive.

Anyways, this blog entry was to re-start blogging practice. Writing is a form of shaping one’s thought process and communicating to others. I’m installing Docker and working through some .NET 9 project tutorials on a free laptop that my coding bootcamp gave me.

Over the past 3.5 years I have embraced the process. Coding every day, polishing and learning the fundamentals of app development in my spare time. And part of embracing the process is enjoying life in all the ways that we can’t measure. Slow Saturday mornings sipping on coffee and play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Going to Seward for a music festival and camping at the family lot. Doing a 5k with a girl who would eventually become my girlfriend. Calling friends over to play Dungeons and Dragons, Wii Sports and have a few Alaska-made Seltzers.

It’s been such a beautiful 3.5 years away from the blog and documenting my coding progress. But it’s time to catch the rhythm again. It’s time to learn, keep my sword sharp and ride the next wave of Software Development through AI.

Written with StackEdit.

Life has improved greatly since being employed with the State of Alaska - Department of Natural Resources as of August 2021. Sadly though my time and attention to this blog was lost.

In addition to adjusting to my new 40 hour work weeks, I am also finding how to use my limited free time. I’ve done some digital painting and rewarded myself with some video games. I do weightlifting or calisthenics every so often. But most of all I’ve just been enjoying the cold Winter of Alaska, surprisingly.

I turned 26 last November. I bought my family Christmas presents, and was happy to do so.

And then 2022 arrived.

But before getting into that, let’s take a look at 2021 in recap.

January 2021 - Arrive in Washington, with plans to join the Army. I began applying to different jobs in the meantime. One of these was Per Scholas’ Full-Stack Application Development Manager course, with a guaranteed Infosys interview at the end of 15 weeks.

February 2021 - May 2021 - Full Stack ADM course, full time. Experiment with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Began micro-investing in the stock market.

May 2021 - Move to Alaska, enrolled for a semester at UoPeople, and began job searching again. Get rejected from Infosys and Pendo.io. Applied to Apple and Google apprenticeships, but didn’t even receive rejection letters. :(

July 2021 - Receive a job offer from State of Alaska

August 2021 - Began work with the Department of Natural Resources.

And everything since then has been a bit of a blur. In October, due to the Coronavirus Pandemic I switched to working from home full time. Now in January, we are back to the office.

Programming / Art

At work I’ve been mostly focused on .NET Core MVC, Entity Framework, Microsoft SQL Server, and a small portion of Python.

I’ve been wanting to improve in Javascript but that is particularly slow. I have made a few simple things in Vue.js and began working on some MERN stack tutorials.

I haven’t done much with Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence for the last few months.

I’ve been reading a bit more. My booklist includes Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Einstein’s Fridge, and 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I only read when there’s time and it feels appropriate.

The books I finished last year include Atomic Habits and How to Live by Derek Sivers.

And just today I got accepted into a Per Scholas Alumni course offering, Google’s UX/UI Design course on Coursera. So that will be a 6 month undertaking on top of work.

Below, you can see a painting that took me months. I started it in about July, working on it every few weeks when I felt the urge.

It’s only now, months later, that I feel it’s 90% finished. I say that because I’m still testing out different ideas with this painting :)

Lessons learned from 2021

Family is important, as long as the relationships are healthy.

Otherwise, a little distance is beneficial.

Mental and Spiritual Health has a lot to do with feeling secure within yourself. Having a job and the financial means to support yourself is one of the most peace-of-mind things you can do, more beneficial than all the hours of reading, meditation and careful planning combined.

We are limited. In skill, in what we can accomplish, in stamina, in emotion, and in time. We are limited. Acknowledge that we are imperfect, human, beings and it’s more than just ok to be who you are.

Love your limits.

Ambitions are not to be taken lightly. I have learned this year that we can become addicted to over-work and accomplishment, just like alcohol or gambling.

It is not accomplishing our goals that satisfies us. It’s the pride of moving towards those goals. It’s the emotional feedback after all our effort starts to show tidbits and pieces of the results we seek.

Ambition is a powerful force that can take us far in our journey. Because forgetting to enjoy the journey, and to rush to “what’s next” is also a form of delusion.

So choose balance instead. Clock out and be proud of it. Take forever and a day for personal projects. Go out and enjoy a meal at a new restaurant, watch a movie, and play some video games.

Don’t dedicate solely to work and ambitions. The present moment is all we have.

Use it freely.

Thank you for your patience.

Love from the Pacific North West

Chris

You can see 20,000 views, but only 25 reactions

On that note, I’ve tried to be more conscious of my time with technology. Overworking in a single day is a recipe for disaster and burnout as a programmer. The same rule applies if I were to focus full time on being a musician. Right now my main goals are to complete college courses this term to inch towards my Associate’s degree in Computer Science, so I spend about 10-20 hours a week on college work. I usually spend another 10-20 hours reading (currently on Eloquent Javascript and Principia of Isaac Newton) or working on personal coding projects.

This past 4th of July Weekend I have been working on my LAMP server I made using DigitalOcean droplets. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL andPHP/Perl/Python, running Ubuntu. It’s been interesting setting up strictly using Linux on the commandline, and a bit frustrating but fun having to configure secure ssh connections. Soon though I’ll be able to start launching some fun little apps here, and I feel like I’m growing a lot as a Web Developer, migrating into a pure LAMP Ubuntu environment from the good old Cpanel on BlueHost or GoDaddy.

What setup looks like

Connecting via the terminal, ssh and linux commands. Also note, UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) and fail2ban security measures! :)

Have yet to configure or load much. I’m planning to experiment with several sites on one server, or multiple droplets for different sites.

I just finished a clone of SpaceInvaders using Kaboom.js on replit.com, and it was surprisingly easy to follow. They syntax for the framework was a bit unfamiliar but it was surprisingly fast. You can watch the tutorial for Kaboom.js games here. There is also a Super Mario clone I am working on right now.

Kaboom.JS games

I also messed around a bit with e.rip after seeing it mentioned in Elon Musk’s instagram bio, curious as to what it was. e.rip seems to be a link-shortener and “map” of sorts to host all kinds of links in one place, as well as see full analytics of what’s going on. Visitors, visitor ip’s, and click amount are all viewable. I made a quick page at e.rip/openspace and it’s pretty cool how quickly you can design together a nice looking page. After researching more, it seems like e.rip is built on a codebase called Biolinks made in php, as found here and it appears that AltumCode was the original author of this code. Extremely interesting information after seeing how simple e.rip is to use.

e.rip Analytics, block building for “link collection” pages.

As for college, I am taking a course in Ethics and Morality, and Programming I which is using Java.

Hope to see you all soon, with a few more coding projects and updates as they come along. I’ll also be updating the blogs features and functionality in the near future, so please stay tuned!

Best wishes from the Pacific North,

Chris

Here are some screenshots from a personal use of AWS AI services, to scan the first two minutes of the “Popstar” by DJ Khaled ft. Drake music video. Surprisingly, even though Justin Bieber is the main actor in the music video, the “Celebrity” part of the AI Analysis didn’t recognize him at all! But I did learn who Logan Richardson, with his brief 5 second appearance in the video, was. Apparently he is a celebrity.

Drake appears to AWS AI

DJ Khaled appears to AI!

But poor Justin Bieber. AWS doesn’t recognize him.

I will be writing individual articles regarding my Full Stack training, how I used AWS AI services to analyze a viral music video from DJ Khaled and Drake, as well as other entries not dealing with code.

I will also continue experimenting with Jekyll to make this blog a bit more interesting. I’m thinking to include a projects page, a reading-list page, and an arts page (for my digital art and visual/audio elements).

And finally, probably the news I am most excited about : after months of following OpenAI’s progress, I was accepted as a Private Beta Developer! In short, I get a bit of extra privelege for accessing the docs and tutorials, a playground, and even being part of a community of other AI/ML enthusiasts. The journey is only beginning, and it really feels like I want to just learn and create as much as I can.

It’s gonna take patience, focus, and consistency, for as long as it takes. There is no off-switch for passion, but I do need to make sure I’m enjoying Alaska, keeping active, and prioritizing what really matters.

Good evening from the Northern Pacific and the Gulf of Alaska,

Chris

Seeing nothing wrong, and since pip install had been ending quite poorly, I decided to install Anaconda on my Mac.

And magically, things began to work!

Check out this working clone of the Dall-E project from Open AI.

After that, installing missing Python libraries (like Torch, Dall-E, etc) became much easier. Anaconda also had it’s own tool to start Jupyter Notebooks and type in code.

So what have I learned so far? The approach methodology became so much simpler using Anaconda for Python.

Nowadays I need to shift gears and study other things so I may have less time for Machine Learning. However, this current success with cloning some basics from OpenAI’s public repo is hinting at a lot more fun to be had in the future.

Can’t wait to come back to the blog and share what I’ve learned.

Good Afternoon from the Pacific

Chris

“This is the official PyTorch package for the discrete VAE used for DALL·E. The transformer used to generate the images from the text is not part of this code release.”

First things first, let’s fork the repo from the OpenAI github repo

I just downloaded the code, opened the zip in the same folder area as my other Python notebooks, and typed in

pip install DALL-E

As per README file on the github repo. Since I’m on a Mac (using iterm2) I then type

cd DALL-E-master

To get into the DALL-E folder on my Mac. Then

jupyter notebook

to get our DALL-E clone up and running. Quite simple so far. Output shown below.

Then we navigate to the usage.ipynb notebook and see the following code output.

But surprise! We get an error. _lzma module is missing!

And…missing module error strikes again. Installing it in the terminal in our folder area should help.

brew install liblzma-dev

brew install xz or brew reinstall xz to update.

Good Afternoon from the Pacific

Chris

So, although I deeply love code and working with data, my real interest is in seeing how I can embed art and music, or other forms for sensory experiences. It’s all about the experience.

To start off my experiment today, let’s see how we can add some gifs to our Jekyll blog. We’re gonna follow this article to make our gifs.

I love Space, so let’s see if NASA has some extra imagery lying around. I found a great video and made this gif from it. Click on it to see the original video courtesy of NASA’s YouTube page. It edits moon imagery with classical music, super pleasing.

First, we made a gif that is also a link to the original video. ^

And amazingly enough, an Mp4 that caught audio in the original video! It does play the audio backwards halfway (the point the gif reverses play) so it’s quite eerie…but space appropriate!

So what can we do with gifs in Jekyll? Well, making and embedding gifs are half the battle. But after that, using Markdown and Gifs makes things quite simple. Jekyll is super pleasant to work with, and Markdown is actually quite capable too. Be sure to check out ccpaco.github.io/algoTrader-day-2/ to see some links to Jekyll and Markdown tutorials. All I did was follow these and I got my own free blog up and running!

What’s your learning style like? I’d love to hear what you’re working on.

Drop me an email, wedesignguam@gmail.com. I love getting digital mail.

Good afternoon from the Pacific

Chris

:snake: import numpy as np

Then we assign Adj_Close to daily_close for both Microsoft and Apple.

:snake: daily_close = msft_data[['Adj_Close']]

We can’t do this for aapl, we would need a new variable name here. So we’ll only use Microsoft data to simplify things.

:snake: daily_return = daily_close.pct_change()

:snake: daily_return.fillna(0, inplace=True)

:snake: print(daily_return)

So next we have set our daily_return, replaced NA values with 0, and printing out the daily_return. The result is as follows.

(In the tutorial, at this point there is an error. adj_pricesadj_price = msft_data[‘Adj_Close’] should be instead adj_price = msft_data[‘Adj_Close’])

:snake: adj_price = msft_data['Adj_Close']

:snake: mav = adj_price.rolling(window=50).mean()

A few lines of Python more, and we get to plotting. Follow along.

In the command line first, run pip install matplotlib and brew install python-matplotlib.

:snake: pip install matplotlib

:snake: brew install python-matplotlib

:snake: import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

:snake: adj_price.plot()

:snake: mav.plot()

By this point we’ve got some nice charting going on from our captured Microsoft data. This is day 4 of creating a Python algorithmic trading advisor. Data Science is wonderfully simplified in modern years. If I can learn this, you can too.

Actually, we’ve encountered some errors using install matplotlib. Current output is shown below. Perhaps I can get some help solving this issue. But at least I learned something new today, getting snake emojis for Python Code! I did this by adding the jemoji gem in the config.yml file of my Jekyll Blog.

Thanks for reading.

Researching Stack Overflow

Good Evening from the Pacific

Chris

msft_data.describe()

aapl_data.describe()

to see some statistics like mean, standard deviation, min, max, and the 25% and 75% quartiles.

And we see the following output:

So for statistics type calculations, we can see the benefit of .describe().

There is also the benefit of .resample(), which expands the time range of data we can observe!

Good afternoon from the Pacific

Chris

I had installed Python 2.7 and some version of Jupyter previously so I had to update to Python 3.7. Also had to update Jupyter and Pip

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip

python3 -m pip install --upgrade jupyter

Then installed necessary python libraries.

pip install pandas

pip install quandl

pip install numpy

Then created the notebook algoTrader by typing jupyter-notebook algoTrader in the terminal.

Further following the tutorial at Free Code Camp I began typing Python code in the new Jupyter notebook.

import pandas as pd

import quandl as q

q.ApiConfig.api_key = "Your_Quandl_API_KEY_HERE"

Begin grabbing data from Microsoft and Apple by their respective ticker symbols MSFT and AAPL.

msft_data = q.get("EOD/MSFT", start_date="2010-01-01", end_date="2021-01-01")

aapl_data = q.get("EOD/AAPL", start_date="2010-01-01", end_date="2021-01-01")

Now, the data is random because we are not paying for Quandl services. There are premium, paid data sets available though.

And finally seeing 5 rows of data

msft_data.head()

aapl_data.head()

And then we get to this output:

To get started writing blog posts like this, I used github pages and Jekyll. This is free! Here are three helpful links as a thank you for reading so far.

Get started with a free blog using Jekyll and Github

Master Markdown for writing posts!

Creating new posts for your Jekyll blog

That’s all folks! Good Evening from the Pacific, Chris