This week, I’ve been working on blinking smart bulbs in my house when my favorite professional sports team scores points (you can view the first iteration of this project in my previous blog post here). This previous method technically works but there is about a 45 second delay between a score and the resulting blinks. […]
Blink Lifx Lights When Your Team Scores
My dad and brother in law are in a friendly war for who can do the coolest thing with smart bulbs. My dad recently had an idea that he would like to blink his lights whenever the Colts score. Had he wanted to do this just a few months ago, it would have been really […]
An Introduction to Containers: Part 2 – Containerizing Python and MySQL
In the previous post, we reviewed what containers are and why they are useful. In this post, we will look at containerizing my board game geek scraper. Initial Plan The general goal will be to use Python for the actual scripting, Docker for creating the containers, and Kubernetes for container deployment. We will first need […]
Keyforge Data Scraping Part 3: Plots
In the previous two posts in this series, I looked at the Keyforge API and wrote a simple script to scrape it into my own database. In this post, I’ll show some of the initial findings from this data. Power BI First, I created a simple Power BI report by importing in all of my tables. […]
An Introduction to Containers: Part 1
Containers have been around since the 1970’s and over the last 5 years, there has been a big push in the software development world to really start implementing them. In this multi-part series, I’ll look at what containers are as well as how they are used and applied. The first part of the series is a […]
Keyforge Data Scraping Part 2: The Script
In the previous post in this series, we discussed the API for the new procedurally generated card game called Keyforge. In this post, we’ll walk through a simple implementation of the API via PowerShell. The script in its entirety can be found on my GitHub here. Overview The goal of this script was to run through […]
Keyforge Data Scraping Part 1: The API
Keyforge is a new card game by the person that designed Magic: The Gathering. The interesting aspect of this game is that the decks are all procedurally generated. There is a pool of about 350 cards in the game and each deck has a unique grouping of 36 cards. The developers use an algorithm to […]
Blockchain for Business 3.1
The previous two chapters of this course have been overviews of the technology and different development projects for the technology. This chapter will focus on helping teams determine if blockchain is the right solution for their company or problem. Chapter 3: The Promise of Business Blockchain Technologies Objectives Examine several use cases where blockchain technology […]
Blockchain for Business 2.1
Chapter 2: Introduction to Hyperledger In this chapter, we will dive deeper into Hyperledger (the open source blockchain project started by the Linux Foundation). The chapter will give more information on the project, its frameworks, and modules. Objectives Explain the differences between Hyperledger and permissionless blockchain technologies Discuss how Hyperledger leverages open standards and open […]
Blockchain for Business 1.2
In the previous blockchain post, we discussed an overview of what blockchain is and dug deeper into DLTs. This post will still be part of Chapter 1: Discovering Blockchain Technologies, but will take a deeper look into Bitcoin, consensus algorithms, and the challenges of implement DLTs. A Deeper Look into Bitcoin As discussed previously, Bitcoin […]