So it’s been quite awhile since I posted anything to any blog. I did post a couple
updates as I did projects in grad school. The Wordpress site I used for this earlier
died and was hosted on a VMware ESXi server in my homelab. I didn’t have time to fix
it while in school so no postings since mid-2016.
I’ve since graduated with my Masters in Interactive Intelligence (Machine Learning)
from Georgia Tech in 2019 and picked up a couple of jobs that consumed the bulk of my
time. So resurrecting and running my hobby website just got shelved. I did some work
in NLP and wrote an academic paper with a PhD Candidate who became a PhD in Linguistics.
I have a couple YouTube videos, a conference presentation and some code from that work
which I should write an article to share some of the experience and code.
Part of the problem was trying to figure out the best way to get a relatively static
website up and running that would not take too much effort to maintain and manage.
Analysis paralysis took over for awhile as I looked into serverless options and
various hosting providers.
At one point, I considered building a WordPress site again on a Digital Ocean droplet
but I was facinated with the whole static website generated from YAML or MarkDown files
but it seemed limited or challenging to maintain. After recently taking a quick
Jekyll online lesson on Github and doing some digging around, this seemed like a
path forward that offers a lot of options. This requires learning from gray areas
of development I’ve avoided but I’m coming up to speed on this stuff which is a
good thing.
The Github Actions component of this website build is facinating and I’m still
wrapping my brain around what I can do with it. I did some side project work on
OpenLens custom builds for awhile to support a work initative and it was very
powerful.
So I’ve dug out my old WordPress website archives, some articles from
my Google Blogging and even older archives for DarkMagic.org that includes
some work from 1997 when I was at NC State University. That’s the majority of
what I’ve posted here. I’ve got some additional content from the late 1990’s
and early 2000’s that I want to clean up a bit and post still. Those I’ll
dig into as I get time to do them. They are mostly C programming or low-level
hardware work I did in those days.
I still have some rough edges with pagination, color schemes, the integration
between the main site and resume site, but overall this came together quite
well I think.
I’m going to try to make myself post something at least twice a month.
I have two articles in DRAFTS that needs some polish before releasing and
several more that I want to write on various topics. Maybe I’ll write a
post on what I want to write about at some point later once I get a couple
other posts out the door.
Cheers from the Carolinas and hope you have fun reading some of these brain dumps.
–Michael