#projects

1 min read

    I’m a person who likes to package up my work and slap a bow on it, so a lot of what I do will be framed as projects. Some of these may be literal repositories of code within my personal and CGC GitHub organizations. Other work — particularly around data analytics and visualizations and economics research — will be published here.

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    Recent Posts

    • An Annotated Guide to Hobbyist Protein Folding

      — Amaze (or bore) your friends and family by picking up on a hot new hobby that's all the rage — protein folding! An annotated starter to the 2021 paper "ColabFold - Making protein folding accessible to all" (8 min read)

    • APL: Pattern 4; Agricultural Valleys

      — Urban development has the high ground over agricultural and ecological preservation — and it should! *A Pattern Language* annotations on Pattern 4: Agricultural Valleys (2 min read)

    • APL: Pattern 5; Lace of Country Streets

      — How dense is too dense? How sparse is too sparse? Annotations for A Pattern Language's proposals for the density of metro-adjacent country streets for agriculture, recreation, and preservation. (3 min read)

    • APL: Pattern 1; Independent Regions

      — Home isn't where the heart is — it's a single node on a very, very large graph. Annotations for the "Independent Regions" pattern of *A Pattern Language*. (10 min read)

    • APL: Pattern 2; The Distribution of Towns

      — How close is too close? How far is too far? *A Pattern Language* annotations related to the statistical, economic, and ecologic concerns in balancing how dense human habitats ought to be. (5 min read)

    Show 38 more posts

    • APL: Pattern 3; City Country Fingers

      — City, with natural stripes — or nature, with city stripes? Annotations for A Pattern Language, and tracking public opinion of where Americans want to live over the past 50 years. (4 min read)

    • APL: Pattern 0; Introduction

      — Can graphs be libertarian? Authoritarian? Annotations for the introductory portion of the 1977 book A Pattern Language. (9 min read)

    • Privacy Policy

      — When it comes to collecting data, there's a fine line between making a good site and making an invasive product. To make this site more useful, I want to collect enough data to improve, but never enough to undermine anybody's privacy. (3 min read)

    • Ants in the Neighborhood

      — Is Jane Street run by soccer-loving ants? Inconclusive. We *can* conclude that they're fans of Markov Chains, though — an invaluable tool for understanding complex data structures. (1 min read)

    • A Pattern Language, and a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

      — The beginning of a topological review of the 1977 urban design and architecture reference book A Pattern Language, and a journey to understand Earth's greatest graph: the Earth, itself. (12 min read)

    • Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow

      — Annotations for Greiner's 1972 paper "Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow", about the structural composition of organizations at different sizes and requirements. (12 min read)

    • Quick Fix: Tone Down Obsidian List/Header Padding

      — Annoyed by Obsidian Live Preview over-padding headers and aggressively indenting? Some snippets to help keep your notes from jumping around, so you can focus on actually writing them. (3 min read)

    • Work Resume

      — The PDF copy of my day-to-day resume. (1 min read)

    • The Advantages of Advantage: Intro to Probability Convolutions

      — What *is* the advantage of rolling with advantage? Exploring dice roll combinations and probability convolutions. (8 min read)

    • Dice Roll Distribution Widget

      — Discover the probability distributions of different dice roll combinations (1 min read)

    • Widget System Reference

      — Lite reference documentation of the Quartz MDX widget system (2 min read)

    • Quartz Widgets: Graphs, Galore!

      — I killed 4 of my blogs trying to implement MDX support. Will this one be next? Using MDX with Quartz to create interactive graphs, diagrams, and demos — clear as day. (9 min read)

    • Intro to Event Storming

      — Notes from learning Event Storming for domain-driven design. Thoughts on phases, color-coded chaos, and how to transition from fast pitches to full products. (6 min read)

    • AI Policy

      — I may not have any control about how AI affects me, but I can at least make a policy for how I use it. (3 min read)

    • Kickoff: Season of Systems

      — I'm learning to live with the systems that stole my beloved em-dash. A season dedicated to negotiating how to live with the agentic models that have turned my career upside-down. (8 min read)

    • Review: Season of Rhythm

      — Looking back at my year-long attempt to build up long-lasting habits. A retrospective on routines, remote work transitions, and learning the art of slow-and-steady. (7 min read)

    • Chaotic Good Computing

      — Articles for the data and engineering consulting practice Chaotic Good Computing, as well as personal notes by Spencer Elkington.

    • LLMs: A Primer Presentation for Our Newest, Scariest Tool

      — An engineer-focused primer on the mechanisms that drive Large Language Models. Basics on how we got here, how they work, and how to use them without feeling an apocalyptic dread. (1 min read)

    • Typst Resume Template

      — A beginner-friendly resume template in Typst — 100% less LaTeX, 100% more opinions. (38 min read)

    • Before You Slabtop Your Laptop: A Brief Warning

      — PSA: Check if your laptop needs an LCD for POST before removing the screen. Learned this the hard way after 5 hours and a fried motherboard. Learn from my dumb mistakes. (2 min read)

    • GPTinglish: Unnatural Language Processing

      — The only market crashing is the market for sanitized language. Stay human. Embrace typos. (7 min read)

    • Caveat Lector: Reader Beware

      — I'm embracing being wrong on the internet in an effort to learn in public. A disclaimer on digital gardening, dead pixels, and the fear of terminal online-ness. (3 min read)

    • Quantitative Analysis of Markets & Organizations

      — My time at the University of Utah was longer than I'd planned, cut shorter than expected by COVID-19. I was very lucky to have mentorship to push me across the finish line. (1 min read)

    • Breaking Ground on Digital Gardening

      — Why I stopped hoarding 60%-done drafts and started publishing messy thoughts instead. Embracing digital gardening, from-chaos-to-cultivated, and a healthy dose of imperfection. (3 min read)

    • Kickoff: Season of Rhythm

      — "Fight or flight" is a rough way to treat white-collar life. My Season of Rhythm is dedicated to transitioning from constant sprints to slow-and-steady. (3 min read)

    • In Review: The (bad) 2017 Robloxaville Remaster

      — How over-engineering killed a 3-month remaster of an old ROBLOX game. Looking back at the depth of Dunning-Kruger, and how good code doesn't make a good game. (2 min read)

    • Don't Double Down: Structured Streaming to Wrangle Data

      — Stop reprocessing your entire dataset every time new data arrives. A practical guide to Spark Structured Streaming with code examples and cost logic. (9 min read)

    • Littlefield Simulator: The Art of Laziness

      — Efficiency: spending six hours building a web scraper to avoid five minutes of daily work. Automating a business simulation because checking in is for chumps. (8 min read)

    • The Unbearable Weight of ROBLOX Celebrity

      — Being famous online in 2009 is the highest high I'll ever reach. A love letter to the coolest dork I know, hatemail for client-side exploits, and a limitless supply of Monopoly dollars. (11 min read)

    • Say Goodbye to Untitled (5) — GitHub Actions for Resumes

      — Set up continuous integration to auto-update your resume everywhere. Overleaf, GitHub, and LaTeX automation for the perpetually disorganized. (6 min read)

    • Hello, Blog! (Posts by a dummy, for other dummies)

      — The obligatory "Hello!" post to suss out what this site will be. Python examples as unnecessary as the post itself. (1 min read)

    • Entries to SOME 1

      — Stable matching, optimal stopping, and Bachelor analysis - visualized with some care. (1 min read)

    • Utah Office Consult

      — People problems are the hardest engineering problems. A consult on thinking out-of-the-box to explain morale problems in small companies. (2 min read)

    • College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage

      — My college presentation on the Gale-Shapley paper, recorded on an iPad, like a true professional. Non-market environments, matchmaking lattices, and gratitude for good professors. (1 min read)

    • Reading the Room with Beethoven

      — A HackTheU 2019 project for real-time live captioning using remote microphones. (2 min read)

    • What *are* Supply Chains, Anyway?

      — A first foray into network visualization: messy graphs, abject terror. Early data viz experiments searching for supply loops. Bad graphs; interesting questions. (2 min read)

    • Scratch Piano Application

      — An educational waveform visualizer written in everybody's favorite programming language: Scratch. (1 min read)

    • Quicksort: Every CS Student's Favorite Algorithm, Scratched Up

      — Implementing QuickSort in Scratch. Its only real-world accomplishment? Wearing out my mouse's scroll bar. (1 min read)

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