Had a baby, attending conferences & meetups, interviews & C Game-Dev

Hello, World!

My wife and I brought our second child into the world, marking a major life event. It’s incredibly different having a second in large part, because it’s just a lot harder to get a 1 month old, and a toddler, than it ever was one or the other. A crazy amount of coordination is involved, and I’m barely holding onto the vain hope that it will get better in short order, else, as is, I’m noticing the idea of leaving the house is just too much to handle for me. Or I should say, it’s something that requires such a high investment, I don’t know if we’ll be leaving the house multiple times a day, doing several different chores all together as a family as we have. It simply may be vastly more practical for one parent to take one kid, the other parent to take another.

Project Muse Finished | Oh Javascript… |

Project Muse Finished

Project Muse started in January, and finally, I have made the final push I plan to make for a while. The project has grown beyond its original MVP, but I wanted to get it to a ‘workable’ version for my own interests and uses before putting it down entirely. I’ve described how Muse works before, but in summary, using a microphone/camera to stream to the RTSP server, it uses FFMPEG to pull out the audio. Using AWS-S3 we upload the mp3s into a bucket. AWS_Lambda on an event trigger for seeing a new mp3 file in the bucket, it uses AWS_Transcribe to get a JSON object, which includes a string of any human speech detected, a transcription. Another S3 bucket for those, and another Lambda watching here, creating AWS_SQS messages. Why? Well querying SQS instead of S3 is 10x cheaper. My original plan was for this app to work properly, and possibly for me to use it. Being a house running on one entry-level web developer’s budget, I figured anything would be better than nothing!

7 Days Sick | Muse In Composer

Last week I experienced some of the worst influenza I’ve had in several years. I remember being fairly insufferable for my first bout with covid a few years ago, but this was so miserable, for so long, also while having my pregnant wife sick, and needing to care for a child, made this the worst sick experience I’ve had since long before this. Also, with covid, we culturally had an expectation that you won’t be coming back into the office for a bit, so there was a lot less pressure to ‘feel healthy’ asap, which was another variable added into the mess.