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.

Mentoring | Pokemon Nuzlocke | Meetups | HTTP Server Presentations

This week I began coaching a developer, went to some fun meetups, worked on my next golang presentation, and whited out of a Pokemon Nuzlocke

Nuzlocke

Last week, I got a ‘gameboy’ emulator from Anbernic. It’s basically the most interesting bit of cheap tech I’ve ever gotten my hands on. It ’emulates’ old retro game. For my purposes, Gameboy Color, Advance, and DS are the games I most wanted to visit. Specifically, I still have a lot of passion for the games I let engrosse my childhood, Pokemon. Nowadays, many people have learned to modify the original games, into bigger, more complex games. Harder, in particular. That’s how I got started this week, learning to download, modify, and install those games onto my new device. Then began a challenge in Pokemon referred to as a ‘Nuzlocke’. I won’t go into it, other than to say I was playing Pokemon Blaze Black, and lost handily to Lenora. I’m on run #6 at this point, after doing a few restarts to get a contrary Snivy. Nevermind all of that. Now that the device is set up, it’ll be taking up less time this week.

Email Service | gRPC Round 2 | AWS SES

TLDR: In project Muse (security-camera project that uses AI to summarize and send alerts from conversations) I created a new service to send me emails based on video details.

Pigeons

I said it. Pigeons. Muse has a theme that each service is named after a species of bird. I really don’t know why. But here we are months after a snap decision, calling sections of my project pigeon. Parrot is the service that uses AI to summarize large transcripts. When a transcript comes back, we format the response into JSON. We are eventually going to log that JSON into a database. But for now, if the AI detects that a sensitive conversation happened from the list of ‘concerns’ we have, be they crimes, or kiwis, that’s right, the AI is smart enough to detect if people are discussing kiwis! Nevermind that. Now that we’ve detected kiwi-discussions, what are we going to do about that? Well, we need to be alerted of course! But how… I chose email. I’d prefer to manually review video || audio in an email format, as I can do that on my phone too. I chose to use aws SES (simple email service) for this. Tried a few alternatives, but chose SES because it’s cheap and honestly it was what I was what I had already implemented when I realized gmail has too many authentication bugs when using smtp or ses. Since ses was already configured, and working, and free for my needs, I’m going to keep on with it.

Weekly Dev Update #9

Over the last week, most of my work has been contributing to my Project Muse, out of work, as well as hosting the first Golang meetup in my city, and giving a presentation on the Go programing language!

Project Muse | Docker Compose | Anthropic JSON Generation | Golang Meetup

Golang Meetup

In the last week, I finally hosted, and presented for the first Golang meetup in my city! Had a surprisingly good turnout, so I’m happy to announce that I’ll be hosting future meetups for Go in my city. Of course, that means I’ll need to improve on, and prepare for more presentations! So I did a little bit of prep on a ‘How to make an HTTP server in Go’ presentation. I think I want to break it into a 2-part presentation. The first one going through the absolute basics, and the following one is literally writing out the functions and host the app on the cloud so the audience can submit questions. Doing this all in real-time, while presenting is certainly a challenge, but one I’m totally here for! So looking forward to more from the meetups.

RTSP Server | Serverless | Microservices | Go Web Dev

More of an update on how the year has gone nearly 3 months in, where projects are at, where they’ve progressed from, and some skills picked up along the way.

Project Pact

This is a web development project, fairly simple http server, using Go’s standard library for as much as possible in order to learn as much as I can about http servers with Go. There’s a UI for un-signed in guests, with features locked for signed-in users, as well as paying members having all the features. Users have either a ‘manager’ or ‘worker’ role, and managers assign tasks to workers with requirements. Workers complete those tasks, and submit for review. Some nice automation features along with that baseline theme.

Repo Status Updates of The Year

SaorsaDev Blog

complete This blog was made just this year, believe it or not! I made it to try and draw me away from LinkedIn. But LinkedIn feels so much more casual, I’ve always opted in that direction when able. This year, I’d like to get better at feeling like my LinkedIn posts could just be blogs I link to. But that means way more content on this blog, which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a bit of a transition. Nonetheless, despite a lot of complications with configuring the Ananke theme on this blog, it seems to have worked out for the best.

More Game-Dev | Vacation | Focus

Game Dev

Since beginning to work on my game, I haven’t made many posts on the blog. I have been engrossed in the project from head to toe. I haven’t ever found any project quite so fun to build and the challenges have been enlightening.

Part of what convinced me to make a game, was watching a video by Jonathan Blow, discussing that, when you get good at one kind of programming, it creates a plateau. You tend to overcome the same similar problem over and over again. Even if there are a hundred problems you might be solving, there are a hundred thousand problems that exist, but you’ll never run into the other 99.9% of problems if you only ever program in one narrow industry.

GoGameDevDiscord

This week I made a Discord Server for Game Developers using Golang:

https://discord.gg/fhDnKr2Q

GoGameDevProgress

My own game written in Go is coming along. I plan to make a full post about my experiences so far. I have had a ton of trouble with it, however, I am really proud of what it is and has accomplished so far. I still have many hurdles to overcome, so just one hurdle at a time…

Professional API Research

At work, I had been given the opportunity to do a ton of research into what API we plan to use for a service. Never have I been required to go this deep on the documentation of several different API’s, their pricing plans. Going back and forth with our analytics team to see what exactly we needed. It forced me to flex my brain in a very different way. Whiile I wouldn’t say I want to do something like that all the time, I found it crucial experience, and I certainly hope I made the right decisions. One of the many harms of not having a more senior developer to rely on, is that the weight of responsibility falls square on my own shoulders.