Pleasant Surprises
I started this evening totally set on building my own static website generator, based off a GitHub Repository and some Markdown, then caught up to the rest of the world and realized Github Pages already did all of that for me. So, I find myself now with the problem all bloggers face - the part where you actually write content. Rather than do the classic hopeful first blog post, where I promise tons of content, I figured it would be fun to review my spotty blogging history, in no particular order.
Method
I used the Wayback machine to find my old company’s website, then found a link from the Team page to my blog. This is the earliest blog I remember currently.
Miscellaneous past events
2010-08-20 - iFiasco / Double Down delight
I went on a spur of the moment road trip with some friends to Six Flags in Chicago. I managed to lose my phone while riding Superman (the rollercoaster), but despite that still had a great time.
I also had my first Double Down. I was under the impression KFC stopped selling these, but apparently they’re still going strong.
Upon returning to Canada, I found it super hard to replace my phone, because the iPhone 4 just came out, and so people were lining up for that. Of course, I had to join them, which was funny, because it turned out the Skechers store right next to the Apple Store was having a grand opening, and I think the poor fellow thought we were all waiting for him.
That iPhone turned out to be my all-time favorite - still waiting for a nice, tiny, solid phone. The retina display was such a shift at the time.
2010-12-01 - iOS Development
During 2010, I co-founded a company called Digihedron and we did a lot of iOS app development. One application that had moderate success was called PassMule - it was just the default password list in app form. I can still remember fighting it out with UITableViews – it’s fun to realize how far I’ve come.
Some other notable applications include Sociables, which was a drinking game that somehow slipped under the radar. We eventually flew too close to the sun by developing a Centurion app (100 shots of beer in 100 minutes) which put an end to our antics when Apple rejected it.
2011-03-04 - CS Games
The CS games are an annual competition which usually takes place in Montreal. I’ve competed multiple times with my school (University of Manitoba), but honestly am pretty bad at programming competitions. That said, the CS Games were a blast, and formed many memories.
One in particular would be a year where we had a budget surplus, and decided to get decked out in era costumes. There used to be a video, but it got lost in the seas of irrelevance.
We later hosted the CS Games in Manitoba in 2012. I don’t think we did them justice, though.
2011-04-08 - FPGA Audio Sequencer
A course project for Real Time Systems got me featured on Hackaday. The Verilog code still lives on Github.
What that article won’t tell you is how poorly my live demo went. Turns out that various receivers of VGA signals are quite forgiving - however, the projector at school was not having any of it. So, classmates were not treated to the strobing colors corresponding to the audio tones eminated from the board.
Robo-curious
We (Digihedron) decided to take a stab at creating a robotics kit. This would come with a breadboard and a number of exercises which were designed to teach simple electronic concepts. I ended up writing most of the exercises and we ended up gifting it as a Secret Santa gift to an electronics enthusiast person I matched with. I seem to recall receiving Reddit Gold or something for my gift, which was extremely lame.
Epicenter
We (Digihedron) decided to make it easier to manage a venue with multiple TV’s and multiple programs by developing an iPad application, an on-premises web server, and some custom drivers for controlling various matrices. It was very well received, but also very custom, which meant it was near impossible to scale. We also ended up running into partnership troubles after a few client installs and so generally have left the idea to sit. Every now and then I want to revive it.
Startup Weekends
I helped organize the inaugural Startup Weekend in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which was pretty much a 52 hour idea-to-company hackathon. I remained somewhat involved with future Startup Weekends and other attempts to jump start the startup ecosystem in Winnipeg, and even won one. There’s even a pretty embarrassing video