Hello Welcome to My Blog!!

Here you will find the different categories of posts about projects I am working on or different tutorials that I wanted to share with individuals. This will be the place where I am able to fully express all my thoughts and feelings about the different projects I had as well as just share general knowledge that I have acquired over the years. I hope you can find some usefulness from this and I look forward to your patronage.

Table of Contents

  • Mar 21, 2025

    Labels Everywhere, How to Automate Labeling PRs

    #cicd#github#labels#prs#code-review

    Labeling PRs is a great way to go about making it easier to triage the importance of dealing with code reviews. In an ideal world we would be able to clear every PR from our repo but it is important to be able to quickly find and fix any issues that come up first over adding new features. That being said there is also great value in labelling PRs to be able to add extra context so that people who can help will be able to properly as well as helping building out changelogs and what not. Because these tags are so useful we would like to use them consistently and that means have a tool to figure out good tags to add to your PR for you automagically.

  • Feb 23, 2025

    It's a Secret, Github Secret

    #github#cicd#automation#security

    When you build applications and you are following good coding principles and guidelines you will eventually find the need to store secrets. Secrets are the key to allow you to build apps and deploy them and even run them in some cases and because of that we need to have ways to store them. Any CI/CD tool that is useful will provide you a platform to store and organize them so that your runners would be able to access them while denying access to other collaborators since they don’t need them but still would want to be able to invoke the CI/CD. This month I want to take a deep dive into github secrets and how we can use them in our CI/CD and the different levels of which you can define them.

  • Jan 7, 2025

    Github Repo Templates

    #github#cicd#repo#git#workflows#project#templating

    Today I want to go over Github Repo Templates. They are a cool tool you can use when you want to bootstrap a new project by using an existing repo and then pull in all the files and even branches so you can kickstart a project into overdrive. This helps you when you already have a project that is already using patterns and tooling that you love and have worked hard on refining the CI/CD to be able to act and be the way you love it and you just want to use that again with a new codebase. You can leverage all that work you put into it and then be able to build up the next project, the next service, the next experience faster!! It is something that I hope I can inspire you to leverage and lets get into the details.

  • Dec 10, 2024

    Making your life easier with a linter, Black for Python

    #python#programming#black#formatting#linting#code

    Today we will be covering how and why linting is something that is really freaking awesome and how it can help you save so much time with just making everything make sense. There is such a different feeling you get when you write code with a linter/formatter that I cannot explain to you in words. You feel like a super programmer because you don’t even need to think that much about convention minus obvious things like naming where you won’t find a tool out there to fix those but with stuff like spacing and where to place brackets it is game changing. Today we will talk about one of these tools I use called Black and why it is so freaking awesome.

  • Nov 9, 2024

    Prompt Engineering: Cognitive Verifier Pattern

    #AI#Prompt-Engineering#Programming-Patterns#Cognitive-Verifier

    This month I wanted to take some time and reflect on things I have learned in my masters program. I have been currently studying and trying to get my degree in AI Development. Most of this course has been me learning the fundamentals elements of what makes an LLM and what AI even is. With this I have learned a lot more about the theory without going into full detail of it and the legacy of the work that has been done. This month I want to go over one of those elements of Prompt Engineer specifically the Cognitive Verifier Pattern and how that can be used to create better responses from your LLM’s that are more relevant and useful then just asking the question.

  • Oct 6, 2024

    AI in School

    #AI#machine-learning#LLM#School#Masters

    Hey All, Today I wanted to talk about the different things I have been up to working on!! I have recently and just finished my first week. So far it has gone a little slow but it is nice to try and figure out how to manage my time with school. The good thing is I have a ton of knowledge in tech which helps me be able to finish more of these intro things rapidly and get stuff done sooner rather then later when it comes to school. But today I wanted to talk about some of the important stuff I went over in class specifically around the wide world of AI. We will be going over: What Kinds of AI are There, What is an LLM, and end with General Thoughts on AI and Its place in the Workplace.

  • Sep 7, 2024

    The stream that built a better website

    #jekyll#decap#python#devops#cloudflare

    This is a small story about the livestream I did while building out the website to be useful with its own admin portal for online editing of blog posts. It all started when I got the notification on my phone I had set to remind me to do my monthly blog post.

  • Aug 4, 2024

    Year in Review

    #personal#dev#blogging

    Howdy Readers!! Today I want to go over what I have learned in the year that I have spent trying to get something written out on paper for over a year haha. There has been so many different things. This year has been interesting and full of change haha. When I first started this blog I had been working in my first job out of college and struggling to find motivation to work and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Then in November I had moved on into a role that I feel in love with surrounded by smart driven people developing tools for scientests that all want to work on research to make the world a better place. I also met someone who is really cool and made me feel a lot better about love and life and finally allowed myself to get into more of my passions and began drawing and coloring again. But I want to talk about everything in this little post haha so please strap in and I hope you enjoy my musings.

  • Jun 29, 2024

    Mentoring and Having a Mentor

    #mentorship#growth#self development

    Today I want to talk about mentorship. I have had experience being on both sides as a mentor and mentee and wanted to write up some thoughts I have about how to be a better mentor for people and finding the right way to be able to work and develop the relationship. When it comes to mentoring it is important that both people put in the effort to help each other grow. Whether you are guiding or being guided each person gains something in the process of mentoring. It can be a small thing if the relationship isn’t built in a useful way or it can be a very deep and make you grow exponentially as individuals. Either way I recommend going through this expereince if you can and I want to tell you about mine in hopes you can find some tools to help you have the best experience you can.

  • May 5, 2024

    Github Pages and Website Hosting through Github

    #Web Dev#Github#Web Hosting#Jekyll

    Hosting static sites should be easy. It is just finding a place to put down some html css and maybe some javascript to make it interesting. It shouldn’t be a problem and yet it is. Most places charge a not insignificant amount of money to be able to host your site no matter how simple. This is where github comes in handy yet again. In this post we will be exploring using github pages to host static content that we want to serve for our projects maybe for docs or maybe for a personal blog like this one. It is a very quick and easy thing to do and hopefully this helps you in making your presence online that much better.

  • Apr 16, 2024

    Studying with Friends

    #Study#Group#Books#Learning

    I have been in a programming study group for a while now and I wanted to share the experiences I had with it. I wanted to talk about specifically exactly how we have learned to study with each other, The struggles we have to coordinate times across timezones, and figuring out a good way to help the group feel useful. I will trying my best to give you tips and tricks to have a fun effective study session if you ever do find yourself hosting or leading your own groups!!

  • Mar 3, 2024

    Testing with coverage using pytest-cov

    #python#testing#pytest#coverage

    Today I want to share something I have been using for a while that I had discovered when I got my new job!! I didn’t realize that you could instead of running coverage.py directly you could set it up so that pytest using a plugin could run coverage.py for you so that you can generate code coverage reports a little easier with a single command. This makes it quicker to add coverage reports to your build pipeline since all you need to do is install it into your pipeline and in a way that apparently is both faster and more detailed then what coverage.py could do out of the box!! Overall if you want to have coverage using plugins for your test runners will almost always be better then using a more generic service.

  • Feb 4, 2024

    Autodoc generation with PDoc

    #python#documentation#blog

    Documentation is really hard. With it you make your project infinitely more useful however if it is bad, it can lead you down a rabbit hole for hours to try and hope something exists when it doesn’t and drive you mad. The biggest problem with documentation is that you have another place where you have to track for any changes made within the code base. There are tons of tools out there for trying to bring the two closer i.e. documentation in your code. The tool I would use right now because it is one I discovered recently is pdoc. Pdoc allows you to use the doc strings that you may already be doing in your code and creates a rich documentation that can be viewed in your browser. The best part is you can even use markdown in your docstrings and it will be properly parsed into the html elements they refer too.

  • Jan 4, 2024

    ChatGPT and Learning how to Think declaritvely over imperically

    #ChatGPT#SQL#Declaritive Programming

    I have recently started looking at what I can do with ChatGPT and one day I was struggling to understand how I would be able to write a query using on SQL to remove the rows in a table where I have this unique identifier but it had multiple rows using the same value. It wasn’t an primary key column and it probably should have been so I had to prep the table to add a UNIQUE index in its place. After banging my head on it for a few hours a friend had the bright idea to use ChatGPT and funnily enough I was able to understand declarative programming and SQL way more because of it.

  • Dec 4, 2023

    Pair Programming with VSCode Liveshare

    #vscode#programming#tools#pair programming#collaboration

    Good Morning!! Today I wanted to talk about a wonderful tool I use to colloborate with my peers, VS Code Live Share. Live Share is a feature that allows you to expose your machine over the network using either github or microsoft to authenticate people logging in and joining you in a coding session. It is super nice for me because I work remote and so there are not a lot of options to be able to collab realtime with others. This gives me a nice way to virtually pass the keyboard to someone while I am on a video call so that they can help me out with tricky issues that would be exponentionally harder to just walk through with a screenshare while also allowing them to be able to increase the font size and poke around and explore.

  • Nov 19, 2023

    Building More out of a Number Guessing Game

    #python#demo#coding#programming#web dev

    Heyyoo, Today I wanted to talk about demos and what stuff you can build with some basic ideas. I had the thought the other day that if people use the number gussing game as a project code kata then what if we could push the kata further then just practicing how quickly one can actually create it. What if we could go even further beyond and make the app more fun to build. Then I had this thought about what if we could start with a number guessing game that is running on a single computer and then push it to run on multiple computers. Have it run as a web server where there could be multiple instances of it going. What if we could make it in such a way that all one would need to do is hit api endpoints to retrieve game state messages for the game they are playing. What if we could even push that even further and just expose the data flow for the game to be api endpoints that would be actions. Then someone could build an entire web app to connect to your web server and play number guessing games from where ever however they wanted to develop it. Granted because the code is so simple you might not ever wanna really use it but what if that is just a good enough reason to build it.

  • Nov 5, 2023

    Seeing Code Coverage with Coverage.py

    #python#testing#coverage#code analysis

    Today I wanted to talk about Code Coverage. Specificallly what it means what you tools there are for python and why someone would want to even use them.

  • Oct 5, 2023

    Visual Studio Code Tunneling is Nice and You Should Use it

    #dev#tools#ssh#programming

    Visual Studio Code is a wonderful lightweight ide that you should always consider when you start a developement project. It is customizeable to a degree that you can use it as a single ide for everything but it excels at doing web development. That being said setting up a machine over and over again is super annoying and I keep finding myself trying to find tools to not have to do it. VS Code luckily has recently released a feature called Code Tunnels. These Tunnels create a dev server that can enable the pc you are running it on to be accessible to you from anywhere.

  • Sep 8, 2023

    Setting up a K8's cluster using KIND

    #infra#docker#k8s

    Today we will be discussing K.I.N.D, a tool for being able to setup a kubernetes cluster inside a docker host. I will be exploring why someone would want to do that and what things you can do with a K.I.N.D cluster.

  • Sep 5, 2023

    Setting up custom domains using CloudFlare and Google Domains

    #infra#cloudflare

    So I wanted to share my experience with setting up things with my new fancy domain name!! Currently I have setup cloudflare to hold power over my domain that I had recently bitten the bullet for using Google Domains.

  • Sep 4, 2023

    Making a loot system

    #python#game-dev#web-dev

    Heyyoo!! I haven’t written in a while so I wanted to talk about some work I found myself doing for the Yugioh Card Puller project. It was really fun because it had to do with building out a system in which I would be able to have a weighted list of items and select one randomly where the weight was correlated with the likely hood they would be selected.

  • Aug 21, 2023

    Styling your Github Profile using README.md

    #github#markdown

    I wanted to look back on the work I did to design my github profile and share it so that hopefully even more poeple can come to learn how to customize their own profiles using markdown. This is a feature that you can use if you create a repository that is your github username. After that you just add a README.md markdown file and you can make it look however you wanted.

  • Aug 21, 2023

    Adding Projects to My Blogsite

    #jekyll#python#project-update

    I was wondering how I could add projects to this site without having to add each and every entry into the navbar above and that is when I was able to push Jekyll to its fullest form.

  • Aug 20, 2023

    Controlling Builds on Private Networks using Self Hosted Github Runners

    #ci-cd#github#github-actions

    Because I just learned about githubs self hosted runners option I wanted to show yall how to actually get jobs up and running for your CI/CD pipelines and run them on your own runners.

  • Aug 20, 2023

    Making a Python Script to Make Posts

    #jekyll#python#scripting

    Today I will be covering a script I made to help me build posts on jenkins without having to remember as much which will be nice. I am working with python a lot so today I decided to write a script that can generate at template for me to start bulding the post headers and what not based on when I wanted to create the page

  • Aug 19, 2023

    My First Blog Post

    #jekyll#markdown

    Heyyo!! this is my first blog post where I am learning how jekyll works and what I want to do with this site. Please excuse the messyness of this and the bad grammar. I am still trying to understand both how to write and how to use Jekyll so I hope you stay along with this journey.