The site I’m working on now, deploys as static files. I haven’t put up a non-server-side-dynamic site since high school, so I’m exploring my options. I thought I could just throw the whole thing up on Amazon S3, but was surprised that it was slower than the current setup (nginx on Linode). I have been reading about the importance of fast load speeds on conversion, google ranking, etc (for example), so speed is a big priority for me. Here’s how I cut my site’s page load time down from around a second to around 500ms. Continue reading »
Feb 132012
My Etsy store has been doing well, but I’d like to overcome the friction of requiring an Etsy account. To reach a wider audience, I’d like to additionally offer my products on a site that wasn’t specific to a community. To that end, I created a tool which generates a static HTML + Javascript eCommerce site. Here’s the result: Creative Retrospection. Continue reading »
It’s hard to say what sort of sales rate is reasonable or average for a new Etsy store. I spend a fair amount of time in the team forums, and the general consensus I’m getting is that it’s really hard to make any/many sales for smaller shops, but that larger shops (100+ items) tend to make several sales per week. Given that understanding, I have set a goal for myself that I think is aggressive but achievable. Continue reading »
Celtic Knot Mirror
Laser Cut Flower
I’ve completed the first pass of what seems to be a popular electronics self-education project: a home thermostat. I’ve already written about some of the software, and now I’d like to share some of the hardware details. Continue reading »
Jul 182011
For Hot or Not, I wanted to leverage as much existing code (open-source libraries) as possible, so I could focus on the more interesting application logic. I found a library to work with the database (RRD), but there were a few things about it that didn’t fit my needs, so I ended up releasing a new library. What follows are the reasons I decided to build my own solution, and the downsides to that course of action. Continue reading »
Recently, I’ve worked on two projects (Power Hungry, Hot or Not) which (among other things) collect write-once data over time, and graph the results. The projects collect very different data, but this task was painful enough in postgres that I ended up switching to a temporal database for the second go, and it made the data collection & querying much easier. What follows is a brief discussion of the problems I faced with postgres, and how moving to RRD solved them. Continue reading »
Jun 272011
My latest project, Hot Or Not, is live! It combines Arduino, NodeJS, Coffeescript, and Google Calendar, to make a thermostat which is remotely controllable via the internet. You can check out graphs of the data on the site, and get the code on github. Continue reading »
Mar 292011
I finished my first significant electronics project in a while: Power Hungry. The idea is that I use sensors to monitor the actual voltage & amperage usage of various devices in my apartment, and I wirelessly transmit that to a base station, which calculates various statistics. The results are then beamed to my linode server, where I have some graphs of the data. The ultimate goal is to use this data to reduce my overall energy usage, but for now I’m just working on establishing a baseline, so I can best judge the effectiveness of whatever changes I make. The results so far, though, are fairly interesting. Continue reading »
I'm a software engineer in Chicago, working at 
