In my current project, I'm displaying a country's corruption trend from from Transparency International alongside Kiva loans. Since both of these data sets have different refresh intervals and sources, I do a mongoImport to get them into the database. Example records: The data is pretty clean at the get-go with a logical join on the location.country... Continue Reading →
After the research for my last post, I've gotten a bit more curious into micro-loan services like Kiva. I have been a Kiva member for over 10 years now, and love reading the stories of the folks I'm helping. Kiva is also more transparent than the non-profits I've donated to. I can set how much... Continue Reading →
Over the last week, I've received snail mail solicitations from 5 charity organizations. This is about typical. I have given to some of these in the past, so I've been on their list. In looking at the 5, I can recall a specific point in which I felt compelled to donate. MD Anderson Cancer Center... Continue Reading →
In part-one I started a journey on implementing and setting up an initial database using MongoDB. At the end of that post, I had a single collection, called "projects" with a defined schema and about 1000 records populated in it. In this post, I will explore how query many tables/collections, how to update data, and... Continue Reading →
In my free time, I'm exploring the MEAN stack. My previous employer had a few teams running Node.JS & MongoDB and the resulting products and team-velocity looked slick! I'm following "Web Development with MongoDB and Node.js" by Jason Krol. Getting Started with MongoDB For this play-instance, I'm using a t2.micro Ubuntu instance (free-tier eligible) on... Continue Reading →
In large businesses, it isn't unusual to have different approaches to software delivery. The finance organization may choose to outsource development and prefer a detailed statement of work at the beginning of the project. They would choose the waterfall methodology leading to a higher confidence in delivery timelines. Their projects may last months, but the... Continue Reading →
We were way off. It started by hearing a customer requirement from an internal stakeholder. The customer was apparently pissed and threatening to leave for a competitor. They spent over $100k monthly and were trending higher-- but if we didn't get our act together and produce what they needed, we could kiss that revenue goodbye.... Continue Reading →
Whoah. It has been way too long since my last post. This week marks the end of a wonderful journey with Rackspace. Rackers (aka Rackspace employees) are brilliant and they didn't mind me listening attentively and asking absurd questions. And for some reason, they kept promoting me over the 6 years I was there. As... Continue Reading →
Work: "Want to go to Switzerland, Joe?" Me: "Visit a country known for chocolate, cheese, and particle physics? I'm already packed." This was an awesome trip. And yes, I'm going to bore you with pictures. First the geeky. One of the first world wide web servers (invented @ CERN in Geneva): Speaking of CERN, known... Continue Reading →
Happy Father's day to my Dad, his Dad, and my Step-Dad. : ) I recently got about 16 family home videos and started a project to copy them to DVD for preservation. I've counted 15 firework shows, 27 sunsets, and countless clips of me rolling my eyes at the camera. As father's day approached,... Continue Reading →