Since I was a kid I've been pretty intrigued by artificial life simulations. It started most predictably with Tamagotchi, but when I got a PC in the mid-90's I learned that there were people out there interested in making their own, more elaborate, versions of artificial life. One that's still available today is Gene Pool , and I remember one that consisted of a 3D modelled woman who wandered…

Allegedly someone named Emmert Wolf said or wrote, "A man is only as good as his tools". Now, no one seems to know who Emmert Wolf is or where he might have said this, but he probably lived sometime before the last 5 years because if he were alive today he'd probably know better and say something like, "an individual is only as good as their tools," instead. While the statement might only be…

I recently started working more with AWS Lambda functions , some of them with external dependencies, and I quickly ran into an issue where dependencies that are built on MacOS sometimes don't play nicely with Amazon Linux on Lambda. The solution, back in the early days of Lambda, was that you would have to spin up an EC2 box, and then build and zip up your dependencies there. Luckily, things are…

It was nice to go for a ride after all that rain.

We got Viggo a raincoat. Not sure if he likes it.

This is a quick hit and run post on how I got my Gatsby site up and running on S3 and CloudFront with minimal fuss. The main perk to running a site this way is that it is very nearly free. Unless my blog gets a lot traffic, I assume I'll be paying at most $6.00 a year to host my blog. That's cheaper than I've ever hosted a site for, and the entirety of that charge is just paying for Route 53 to…

Hi! Welcome to my new blog. I don't really know what I am going to put here, because I haven't blogged in so long that I feel mostly like I have nothing worth saying. I wanted to learn some React, and Gatsby seemed like a cool way to use React as sort of a framework for building simple websites. I'm only in the beginning stages, but components seem like a very nice thing for web development, and…