Author Archives: ron

Exploring Algorand: Preparing to query blockchain data

Posted on November 27, 2021 by ron

I’ve been exploring Algorand as a blockchain platform to build on. Algorand supports smart contracts via its own virtual machine, has a good transaction rate, low fees, is decentralized, and uses a proof of stake consensus algorithm. This post starts … Continue reading →

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Automatically installing and cleaning up software on Kubernetes hosts

Posted on September 3, 2021 by ron

I had a need to automatically install software on each node in a Kubernetes cluster. In my case, security scanning software. Kubernetes can start new nodes to scale up automatically, destroy nodes when no longer needed, and create/destroy nodes as … Continue reading →

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Apache Spark Experiments

Posted on December 4, 2016 by ron

I’m in the process of learning Apache Spark for processing and transforming large data sets, as well as machine learning. As I dig into different facets of Spark, I’m compiling notes and experiments in a series of Jupyter notebooks. I … Continue reading →

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Migrating Drupal and WordPress sites using Docker

Posted on November 13, 2015 by ron

There’s several sites I host for family and friends in addition to this site. It’s a mix of WordPress, Drupal, and static sites, all running on a Linux virtual host hosted by Rackspace. The Linux host is pretty old at … Continue reading →

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Type-checked JavaScript : TypeScript and Flow

Posted on October 2, 2015 by ron

The last couple systems I’ve been working on have been almost completely JavaScript, with a bit of Python thrown in where it made sense. Working in a dynamic language like JavaScript, small mistakes like mistyping a symbol name don’t get … Continue reading →

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Converting Maven APT docs to Markdown

Posted on July 27, 2015 by ron

In a project I worked on many moons ago we were writing documentation in the APT format, and publishing to HTML and PDF using a Maven-based toolchain. APT served us well, but it hasn’t been supported or improved by the … Continue reading →

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Encanto Squared

Posted on September 24, 2014 by ron

I’ve been working with Encanto Squared lately, and will be posting on the Encanto Squared Engineering site, with more of a focus on Node.js, Polymer, AngularJS, and other technologies we’re using. Speaking of which, Encanto Squared is hiring. If you’re … Continue reading →

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Sculptor point release and documentation

Posted on February 2, 2014 by ron

This post is just a couple quick updates on the Sculptor Generator project. Hot on the heels of the major 3.0 release, release 3.0.1 is out with additional improvements and examples. Kudos to Torsten, who’s been on fire cranking out … Continue reading →

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Profiling Maven Sculptor execution using YourKit

Posted on October 26, 2013 by ron

The latest version of the Sculptor Generator is based on XTend 2, which is compiled to Java/Bytescode rather than interpreted as XTend1 and XPand was. This should bring large performance improvements to the code generation cycle, and it certainly feels … Continue reading →

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Working with Geospatial support in MongoDB: the basics

Posted on July 15, 2013 by ron

A project I’m working on requires storage of and queries on Geospatial data. I’m using MongoDB, which has good support for Geospatial data, at least good enough for my needs. This post walks through the basics of inserting and querying … Continue reading →

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