About

Projects

• Today I Learned: TIL was my apprentice project at Hashrocket. It has grown into a popular developers blog with 2000+ posts, millions of page views per year, and the top-ranked answers on Google to many an esoteric developer question. It's also open-source, one of the first such Phoenix repositories online. My team used TIL as a vehicle to learn Elixir and develop our growing Elixir practice.

  Stack: Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, Heroku

  Code: GitHub

  Live: View site

  

  Purpose and Goal: The purpose of this application was to help me develop my skills as a programmer. Today, TIL exists to catalogue the sharing and accumulation of Hashrocket's knowledge as it happens day-to-day. Posts have a 200-word limit, and posting is open to any Rocketeer as well as selected friends of Hashrocket.

  Stack Explanation: TIL launched as a Ruby on Rails app. In 2016, we rewrote the application in Elixir to learn that language and see how Phoenix compared to Ruby on Rails.

  Lessons Learned: Learning in public is a valuable offering. Elixir is a joy to write. Phoenix stacks up well against Ruby on Rails.

• The Bell: The Bell was a COVID-19-inspired social-distancing code/art project I created and maintained from March until October of 2020. Over the life of the project, The Bell was clicked over 4K times by ringers around the world.

  Stack: Elixir, Phoenix, WebSockets, PostgreSQL, Gigalixir

  Live: View site

  

  Purpose and Goal: The purpose of this project was to feel connected with other people, build something calming that defied simple explanations, and direct visitors to a charity supporting relief efforts.

  Stack Explanation: The idea drove my stack. I wanted real-time, virtually unlimited connections, and Elixir with WebSockets was built for this use case. I chose Gigalixir because it offers platform-as-a-service without limitations on some core Elixir features.

  Lessons Learned: This project challenged me as a designer and as a programmer. How do I make the bell look and feel amazing? I felt success was binary: it was either engaging or it was not. My takeaway is that I enjoy building products that follow my imagination.

• React Explained: Here's the pitch: "Do you want to really (really!) learn React, while staying current on this exploding ecosystem? Subscribe to React Explained, a bi-weekly newsletter of amazing, curated React news and resources, simply explained. It’s free! Subscribe now."

  Stack: Revue

  Live: View site

  

  Purpose and Goal: In 2020, I surveyed the technical newletter space and concluded that the existing React newsletters aren't geared for beginners. I want to help somebody learning React today– a person who is overwhelmed by the rapid growth of the ecosystem and tons of shared context in the community.

  Lessons Learned: I learned how to develop and launch a product. There's still ample opportunity for introductory-level React courses and content. Creating a weekly newsletter is rewarding and hard work. There's a direct correlation between the energy you put in and the quality of the resource.

• Game of Life: This is my implementation of the classic cellular automaton and programming puzzle, Conway's Game of Life.

  Stack: React.js, TypeScript, Vercel

  Code: GitHub

  Live: View site

  

  Purpose and Goal: I used this project as a vehicle to better learn React.js and contribute to a growing menagerie of GOL implementations by my team at Hashrocket.

  Stack Explanation: I knew this project would be highly visual, so I chose React.js, and difficult to test, so I added TypeScript. For hosting, Vercel's push-to-deploy and global CDN have been outstanding.

  Lessons Learned: React is a fantastic platform for visual programs. TypeScript helps me feel more confident in code I didn't test-drive.

• Ceramic Nation: Ceramic Nation is an auto-generated internet novel, one chapter per day, supported by a Ruby gem I wrote called Remarkovable. It produces nonsensical, occasionally interesting writing based on a corpus of classic literature.

  Stack: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Heroku

  Code: GitHub

  Live: View site

  

  Purpose and Goal: Hashrocket Chicago had a brief obsession with Markov chains: programs that produce content based on a statistical analysis of past content. Imagine listening to a person talk for an hour and then guessing what they'll say next; that's Markov. As a new developer on the team, I embraced FOMO and wrote my own implementation.

  Stack Explanation: Ceramic Nation is classic Ruby on Rails CRUD, which was my go-to stack when I wrote the application (ca. 2015).

  Lessons Learned: Generated content can be engaging. I can design my own frontend and feel satisfied with the result.