A look back at 2016

I write less often than I ought to, but as time seems to fly by faster it feels more important to me to mark occasions and reflect. What happened in 2016?

Travel:

• Places I visited: Chicago, Dublin, and London for the first time. Berlin and Columbus (both for the first time in over a decade). Las Vegas. Portland.
• I got to see my sisters, a couple of my nieces, and my new grand-nephew.

Art:

• I started painting!
• I took a bunch of photos on my phone, some of which I’ll print.
• I failed to write any new music, but I tried.

Work:

• I learned swift, go, and for real learned how javascript.
• I built out an automation framework from scratch for 2 iOS apps (and contributed heavily to a third).
• I got to speak publicly about my work in software quality assurance (particularly about iOS automation and internal tools).

Life:

• I subscribed to the newspaper, because I feel that it’s important to explicitly support journalism that distributes truth and, for the first time, I felt that I was able to.
• Life continues to be very strange.

Website update

I moved my website to Squarespace and have been loving their templates and design tools. It was great to have a simple blog, but I felt like it really needed a facelift so I gave it a shot. So far so good, simple features, easy to use, and it’s customizable if I find myself with an entire weeks worth of time to sink into it.

Work work work

Tags

front-end, javascript, nodejs, projects

Lately I’ve been working on a few coding projects. A little Javascript here and there. I built a “ride estimator” for the support team at Lyft. We found ourselves using a really cumbersome google doc to estimate prices for potential rides, especially now that we’re open in at least 60 cities. We wind up doing this sort of thing at least a few times a day (10+). With the old system we used to have to open 3 separate windows: the google spreadsheet, google maps, and the ride information itself. The formulae in the google doc were unprotected for some reason, meaning people would regularly, unwittingly overwrite the formula and someone would have to go hunt the actual formula down. It was also a pain to update all these formulae by hand.

I hunkered down and built a little ride estimator in Javascript (served by a NodeJS Express server) that utilizes the google maps API to to grab directions. So you can put in the start and end points of the ride and it automatically spits out the nearest region where Lyft is and estimates the ride for you. Additionally it lets you know if you’re outside of the coverage area or the ride is too long. This streamlined the workflow and cut the time it takes by at least 1/3 saving Support an estimated 10 hours of time a week.

As a bonus it’s tailored to take elements of the beautiful new redesign of the Lyft website. Oh, you’d like to go from Oakland, CA to San Francisco, CA? Here’s about what that would cost:

Delinquency

     It appears that I’m once again seriously remiss in updating this blog, a problem I seek to remedy this very moment. The trouble is that it (by “it” I refer to life, the universe, everything) is all so damn distracting, photos here, projects there, and school always seems to get in the way (especially during the summer, oi vey). I wandered off to Burning Man after summer term, something I never really thought I’d get around to doing and it was certainly one of the best things I’ve ever done. No, really. It’s also remarkably difficult to describe, but it was good and I have pictures here.

I finally wrapped up the album I wrote pretty much from November 2010 to the end of February this year. It’s free, you can download it too, and I’d love to hear what you think of it. It’s on bandcamp here: http://squarerootofboom.bandcamp.com/

Additionally, seeing as I am still underemployed, I’m mulling over possibilities for potential econ research. Details later, I suppose.