Occasionally Things are Considered
Boulder Startup Week and #GiveFirst May 12 2018
When I moved to Boulder, Colorado in 2014 I was immediately struck by the warmth of the tech community here. It’s not the biggest tech scene in the country, it doesn’t have the most exits or a dozen top tier Universities to brag about, but the coders, founders and community organizers in Boulder have built a welcoming community here unlike any other I’ve experienced.
Book Review - Holacracy April 22 2018
I’ve read a lot of 3rd-party perspectives on Holacracy over the past few years, including many about Zappos’ transition to the radical corporate self-management system, but had yet to read the source material on it. I got around to ordering the book last week and found it a surprisingly quick read.
A New Adventure April 13 2018
After 2.5 years building the future of AR/VR & SLAM at Occipital, I’ve decided it’s the right time to build some robots and strike out on a new adventure.
Will Robots Take Our Jobs? November 18 2017
I spoke at Ignite Boulder 33 in September and it was awesome! Ignite’s tagline is “Enlighten us quickly. Short 5 minute talks about geeky passions hosted in Boulder, Colorado every few months.” My geeky passion is obviously 🤖 robots 🤖, so naturally that’s what I talked about.
Hello World with ROS and Gazebo May 27 2016
Over the last ROS has gained a large following and mindshare in the robotics community, both in academia and industry. Its flexibility, ease of use, and wide variety of packages make it great for getting up and running quickly. ROS also has easy integration with the Gazebo simulator making building smart robots even easier.
Value Properties for C++ April 29 2015
On Hacker News this morning I came across http://www.nanoant.com/c++/cpp-field-accessors-cure-for-public-field-fobia which tries various ways of improving the hellishly verbose getter/setter situation in C++, but fails to find one that works adequately.
Controlling Apache with Supervisord February 23 2015
Supervisord is a really simple way to control deployed and long-running processes in the cloud. Configuring a regular program to be run and monitored by Supervisor is dead simple. Supervisor only requires that your program stay in the foreground (not daemonize itself) and it will handle starting, stopping, logging, and monitoring your program for its lifetime.
From Gnome Shell to i3wm November 12 2014
My work laptop is a little bit underpowered and Gnome Shell has been bothering me to no end, so I decided today to switch over to the tiling i3wm window manager. I have tried a few different ones in the past, but never stuck with them for some reason. I was feeling adventurous and fed up, so today felt like a good day to make the switch.
Using CUDA on AWS September 11 2014
Update: Includes additional CUDA packages that had been missed in original version.
ZeroMQ PUB SUB Compatibility June 02 2014
TL;DR - Only ever use a single version of ZMQ at once.
opendirectoryd, CMake, and Missing PATHs May 06 2014
Recently, running cmake on my Macbook Pro under Mavericks had been taking extraordinarily long. To configure a moderately-sized project (~3000 source files, 159 CMakeLists.txt files) I had to wait 30 seconds! On the “CMake Performance Tips” page, they mention that configuring VTK, a very large project, took 14 seconds. Clearly something was wrong.
Using CMake to get around file size limits on Github May 01 2014
I recently ran up against Github’s hard limit on file sizes. They put a hard limit of 100 MB for individual files and a per-repository limit of 1GB per repository. The overall cap is understandable, but I think the 100MB file limit is too restrictive.
Find the last occurrences of a phrase in files with Bash December 18 2013
Yesterday I wanted to extract the last 2 reprojection errors from some log files and came across/created a nice Bash one-liner to do the job:
Homebrew - "The missing package manager for OS X" October 21 2013
Over the last six or so years, I’ve done development on both OS X and Linux, frequently switching between the two and occasionally cross-compiling from OSX targeting Linux. I got used to APT on Linux (Ubuntu/Debian), and always dreaded having to set up a new dev environment on OS X.
Homebrew and Library Search Paths August 28 2013
Homebrew really is everything Fink and MacPorts wish they could be. It works well, it’s easy to modify, and, for the most part, it fits right into your workflow without any changes. Using programs installed by Homebrew doesn’t require you to change your $PATH since /usr/local/bin is already included and most libraries are also available immediately in /usr/local/lib.
Extracurriculars are more important than your major May 29 2013
When I graduated from college with a good job, I kept hearing my friends say: “I should have studied computer science!” My (internal) reaction was always the same. I believe that if they had spent time during college participating in some sort of intellectual or academically oriented extracurricular then they would feel differently, regardless of their major.
A Year of Crossfit May 14 2013
This post was going to be about my experience participating in the Crossfit Games, but I thought it would be timely, given my impending departure from Boston, to instead share my thoughts on Crossfit overall. I’ll be reluctantly leaving Crossfit Boston in a few weeks after about 14 months as a member, and in this post I’ll share my thoughts on the Crossfit community and fitness program. Note: These are only my opinions and only reflect my experience at Crossfit Boston and a few other boxes around the country.
Improving CMake February 02 2013
When it comes to C and C++ build systems, I strongly prefer CMake. Its combination of clean syntax, C/C++ built-in support, and dependency management is hard to beat in the C++ world. That said, I think CMake could benefit from some improvements to its core functions. In this post I will describe a few bits of CMake functionality I use in my projects to make life easier.
New Years Resolutions January 01 2013
I haven’t heard much about “Resolutions” this year from friends or family, or even in the media. Perhaps after years of failed ideas, people have toned down their expectations. Ever optimistic, though, I’ve decided to make a few resolutions of my own. I still think it’s a good excuse to do some life-refactoring and try to make some concrete improvements.
