Like most of the world, I’ve become more interested in NFTs over the past few months. From billion dollar behemoths like BAYC to new entrants like Bushidos the space is booming and shows no time of slowing down in the immediate future. Realizing the growth potential in the space, I decided to sit down and make some NFTs of my own. Only one problem presented itself - how do I make the JPEGs to mint? Read more

This post builds upon the previous post. If you haven’t checked it out already, please do so here In my opinion, SQL is easy to get working initially, but optimizing SQL is a whole different beast. Thankfully, I recently had the chance to optimize a whole bunch of SQL for one of our critical platforms resulting in an over 300% reduction in execution time. While I can’t promise the same result for anyone following this article, I do outline some of my learnings on optimizing for queries on text columns below using the most recent Raleigh Crime dataset. Read more

Background I’ve had the pleasure of working on a lot of different projects and while the language may have ranged from Java to Golang, most have communicated with a database using SQL. In the beginning of my career, I viewed SQL as a unfortunate neccessity, Professor Imilienski at Rutgers changed my opinion. His project and lectures showed us how to view the and analyze datasets in a relational database, and how SQL can be used to gather some pretty powerful insights. Read more

With great power comes great responsibility. Browser fingerprinting is a great power, but unfortunately is not often used responsibly. In fact, companies routinely use the technique to identify with 99% accuracy who the individual browsing their site is. This allows tailored ads to a specific demographic. Perhaps the best use case for browser fingerprinting comes in the form of analytics for site developers. If the developers know what devices and browsers are frequenting the site, they can improve and test for those specific browsers and screen sizes. Read more

After working extensively with AWS Cloudformation the last couple of months, I have noticed that template debugging and creation is not overly fast. To help ease development burden, I have created cloudspeed which aims to bring some more speed to cloudformation by introducing automatic creation/deletion of templates in addition to event traces on creation failure. To help get started with cloudspeed, I have provided a high level overview of cloudformation and infrastructure as code to outline what the service does and why it is helpful. Read more