Tag, but with less running

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....

2019-05-30 · 9 min · Stephan Garland

Oh, CRUD

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....

2019-05-26 · 5 min · Stephan Garland

Adventures With 811

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....

2019-05-20 · 8 min · Stephan Garland

First Post!

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....

2019-05-19 · 3 min · Stephan Garland

About Me

tl;dr tinkerer, can fix/operate anything electr{ical, onic}, know some languages, operated a nuclear reactor, UT Austin MS SWE. Contact info at bottom. I like to tinker. I like to know how stuff works. I will yak shave the hell out of everything. I live in Austin, TX (r/austin will insist I live in Greater Austin, but they’re also pedants), Charlotte, NC (r/Charlotte will not care that I live in a suburb, because they aren’t as pedantic as Austinites) or close enough to it to not matter....

2019-05-19 · 3 min · Stephan Garland