UPDATE: See end for an update on the method I settled on. I run a home server, primarily as a NAS using Plex. It’s an old Dell T310 (X3430 @ 2.4 GHz, 16 GB RAM, 25 TB usable disk with n+1 parity, RAID1 SSD boot drives) which I’ve shoved HDDs into. It’s also my Linux environment when Mac just doesn’t quite cut it, and I don’t feel like starting a VM on the Air. Anyway, having Plex, eventually other people somehow find out that you have a fairly hefty amount (17 TB and climbing) of media, and Plex can share its libraries, so why not? ...

The last project I had during my time as a Distribution Engineer was to map out a nearby town’s electrical system. They had contracted us to handle their maintenance and construction, and their maps were… well, they weren’t. As an aside, here’s a brief explanation of rural electric membership cooperatives (REMCs), municipal power districts (munis), and investor-owned utilities (IOUs) that nobody asked for. Feel free to skip a paragraph or three. ...

CRUD apps. They’re, I gather, 90% or more of what is built, because it turns out users mostly want to be able to save information, retrieve it, change it, and delete it. My work sponsored a bootcamp for JS + PHP, so I attended. After, I felt that I needed some project to practice on, and one need jumped out to me: employee ranking and rating. My employer uses stacked ranking, for better or worse, and the method being used for tracking this Excel, the obvious choice for databases. The first quarter that I was involved with ranking, the pain of trying to merge together everyone’s inputs was painful. I first made a VBA macro that did most of it for me, but then realized a far better solution was a web app. ...

For those of you unfamiliar with 811, it’s a public service that attempts to prevent people from hitting buried utilities. Some utilities, like internet (at least on the to-the-home branches) are frequently trenched minimally at best, and with little to no protection. Electrical is usually adequately buried, but a. you never know b. a big project like adding a pool, a deck, etc. will easily surpass the required depth for any utility. If you, the hapless homeowner, penetrate one of these utilities, you’re probably on the hook for the cost of repairs, not to mention the ire of your neighbors, and of course, the threat of death (from the utility line, not your neighbors - hopefully). ...

Before Reddit, there was Digg. Before Digg, there was /. Anyway, moving on. This site aims to share some of the more interesting stuff that I do, and also, a way for me to play with AWS, because #marketability. I’ll have to figure out Azure and Google Cloud later. When the .dev TLD launched, I thought, “self, you should get one of those, because all the cool kids have a website as a shrine to their hubris.” After an agonizing decision of whether to use first.last, firstLast, firstInitLast, or firstInit.last, I settled on the latter. My name is Stephan, and I like to pretend I’m a software developer. You can read more about my background in my About Me page, but suffice it to say, I’ve been playing with computers long enough to be able to write an autoexec.bat file without the help of the internet (don’t test me, please, it probably won’t work). ...