My thoughts and ramblings. Check out the archive too.
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‘Till Death Do Us Part: Term Limits
Reading Time: 10 minutes Congress “Congress is too old, they don’t have a stake in the game.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Every so often, a news article or viral video circulates showcasing a supreme court justice or congressperson struggling with age related hardships. As of writing, the focus has been on Mitch McConnell, who recently froze during a press conference, […]
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Being, Personhood, and Humanity
Reading Time: 14 minutes There is a philosophical fasciation of personhood. What it means to be human. What it means to have being. How and why that being takes shape. Grappling with one’s self as an opposition to another ‘self’, or basing an identity on the identity of another. The fasciation extends deeply into culture, traditions, religion, and media. How we know who we are,…
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2022 Books In Review
Reading Time: 11 minutes We’re over a quarter the way through 2023, so of course it’s an appropriate time to do a year-in-review book list for 2022. It makes perfect sense! I don’t sit down and read physical books nearly as much as I did growing up, but for a full calendar year, I actually paid for and kept […]
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Writing Music with ABCjs
Reading Time: 6 minutes Recently, I’ve gotten back into composing music, and my ancient iMac (from early 2009) just can’t keep up with MIDI software and music notation software anymore. So, I began to search for a replacement. I found Musescore, which I have quickly grown to love, but it’s not quite enough. I have always wanted a way […]
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ChatGPT & AI – The Benefits and Dangers
Reading Time: 6 minutes It feels like you can’t open Twitter, read a news article, or watch a video clip without somebody mentioning ChatGPT and OpenAI’s latest innovations with artificial intelligence. You have the doomsayers, claiming that tools like ChatGPT are going to replace humans in the workforce and make schools obsolete, and you have the yes-men of the […]
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Your Data and Building a Better World
Reading Time: 9 minutes These three stories depict a world in the not-so-distant future where technology has revolutionized our lives from the mundane day-to-day routines, to the broader city, state, and nationwide management of complex systems and infrastructure. Each story is meant to showcase a potential benefit of large scale data gathering and artificial intelligence systems trained from our […]
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The Internet is Ruining Apps
Reading Time: 3 minutes The internet is slowly ruining apps. It’s slowly forcing more and more of our lives into the hands of a small few companies. It’s slowly removing our ability to control our own data. And it looks like it’s here to stay.
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Stacks, Queues, and Deques – Data Structures in PHP
Reading Time: 7 minutes In my first post of this series on Singly Linked Lists, I mentioned that a list with the ability to add, get, or remove data from more than just the end of the list starts to behave more like a Deque. Then, I said I would cover those details in a later post. Well, later is now, and it’s time to…
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Doubly Linked Lists – Data Structures in PHP
Reading Time: 10 minutes Read the previous article on Singly Linked Lists in PHP here! Read the starting post of the series here! All code in this series can be found on Github Doubly Linked List Principles Available Methods I took a decent amount of time to read through various array and list methods available to other languages like […]
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Singly Linked Lists – Data Structures in PHP
Reading Time: 5 minutes All code in this series can be found on GitHub Linked Lists are where we start our journey in PHP Data Structures. Simply put, a linked list is data that is sequentially organized in which the start of the list (head) contains a reference to the next item (node) in the list. A one-way link […]
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Data Structures in PHP
Reading Time: 2 minutes Data Structures are a hallmark of every computer science program at the university level, and it is unthinkable that throughout the course of study you will never encounter a specific data structure that you are unfamiliar with. As I return to school to pursue a degree in computer science I decided it would be a […]
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5 Tips to Simplify Laravel Code
Reading Time: 3 minutes 1. Simplify if/else statements When writing methods or functions that use if/else statements to check for a condition, we can clean up the function or method by using the shorthand version of a simple if/else like so: 2. Use Laravel’s exists() instead of count() to verify a model instance exists. When querying the database and […]
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10 Signs You’re the Asshole – Airport Edition
Reading Time: 6 minutes We’ve all been there: a long layover at a busy airport, waiting for our flights, trying to find a place to charge our various devices, and trying to get as much rest and relaxation as possible in an otherwise crowded and high stress environment. Even though everyone shares this experience at airports, there always seems […]
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Single Responsibility Principle and Laravel
Reading Time: 9 minutes Developers across the industry are familiar with the Single Responsibility Principle, the idea that our classes, or our functions should have one and only one job to do. This idea helps us better document, understand, write, and update our own code as well as the code of a team member or open source project. The […]
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Update: Tech Tracking Explained
Reading Time: 2 minutes Late last year, I wrote a short piece on how tech companies and advertising firms can track your behavior online, and a large section of the post focused on browser cookies. To have a quick recap, simply put, cookies are small bits of information that are generated by websites and stored on your computer in […]
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One Year Later: COVID-19
Reading Time: 10 minutes One year ago today, at the Early Childhood Services Center in the Continuing Education building of UNM, most of the staff gathered together in one of our larger conference rooms to discuss our departmental response to the then new public health crisis caused by the Novel Coronavirus, Sars-CoV-2, and the disease it brought on, COVID-19. […]
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My Favorite Narrative Podcasts
Reading Time: 3 minutes Podcasts are one of my most consumed forms of media, followed closely by serialized TV dramas. In 2020, according to my screen-time and time tracker, I spent on average 2 hours per day listening to podcasts. While that may not be very much on a daily level, there are absolutely some days where I binge […]
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My Favorite News Podcasts
Reading Time: 2 minutes Podcasts are one of my most consumed forms of media, followed closely by serialized TV dramas. In 2020, according to my screen-time and time tracker, I spent on average 2 hours per day listening to podcasts. While that may not be very much on a daily level, there are absolutely some days where I binge […]
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Where the hell are all the web apps?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Have you ever downloaded an app on your phone or tablet and then tried to access your account from that app on a browser, only to find out that a web-version of the app doesn’t exist? In the age of iOS and Android app development, it can be surprisingly easy to forget that the first […]
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Tech Tracking Explained
Reading Time: 7 minutes If you’ve spent any time online in the past decade, you’ve noticed that elements of the digital and physical world tend to follow you around in ways you might not expect it to. If you have a Facebook account, you may have noticed that after talking with a friend about ordering pizza, you’re seeing ads […]