Luke Carlson's thoughts

Shoutout to Ben, Fernando, and the rest of the Ruse Labs crew for putting on such a great algorithm auction at the Cooper Hewitt yesterday! The art was unique and the music was spectacular. Check out the piece the New Yorker wrote about the project:  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/beautiful-code

— with Benjamin Gleitzman

The Daily Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania’s student run newspaper, quoted me in their recent article about student teaching assistants.

Yesterday I saw this post on HackerNews where the user recreated their resume as a C file. It looks great because the file still reads like a resume and compiles to output the information as text. I decided to do the same thing with a more obscure language: OCaml.

If you want to check out the (pretty much) finished product it is on my github here. An excerpt of the file is below:

There is definitely still more to do with this project:

Use a library to make the output more pretty (right now it prints out as standard text to the console). For this I could use PPrint or Format

Use printf instead of having multiple different print line statements

Change the name/structure of the job struct in order to handle a variety of different roles

I recently redid the website for an asset management firm. It's a static site with a Home and Contact page. For the design, I used a Zurb Foundation theme called Base2013. I thought the theme was very well designed and easy to use.

After:

Before:

From August to November 2014 I was involved in the modernization of Roy Cho's website as he ran for public office in NJ. I focused on converting mockups into HTML and hooking up the wordpress backend to the news page and contact forms.

Redesign:

Original:

This author wrote a great piece on why designers should avoid using the color black in any design. Specifically, straight black can be jarring and darker colors look more elegant. To prove his point, the author shares real world examples of great 'almost black' color schemes, in both real and digital art, that would look worse if they were all black.

I'm definitely convinced.

http://www.jlukecarlson.com/apps/whatshappening/

Whats Happening App

Check it out here

Its a content aggregation django app designed with mobile users in mind

Made by Luke Carlson and Chris Beyer

How to Run It

This repo is a django app so add it to your INSTALLED_APPS in the settings file

Next, add this to your urls (in this case the files were put in a folder called 'whatshappening'):

Interesting insight into one intern's experience at Mozilla

The author of this piece explains how Starbucks' method of asynchronously processing drink orders makes it a more efficient and effective company. His insights can be applied to many different industries and I liked how he used real world examples for clarity.

WellRead40 is quality source of important works throughout the ages.

The creator of the site compiled these 'lessons' to share the books they think are most essential to gain a solid foundation in the humanities. As explained in the about section, the site is designed to almost mirror the experience of having an English Major as an undergraduate.

Clearly it is a lot to read but If I am ever looking for a new challenging book to read, I know where to go.

I only had a vague understanding of the difference between the two before I read this piece.

===

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.

All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40 pounds a “B”, and so on.

Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

===

from sivers' comment on HackerNews

https://github.com/jLukeC/advanced-text-editor

advanced-text-editor

a text editor made in python. Can handle multiple windows and the major mac shortcuts. It is the advanced version of my other editors

Hardest parts

Allowing multiple windows took a while especially since file commands did not work if I had trouble... (look below)

Determining text widget in focus without this, multiple windows couldn't work nor file commands. The solution ended up being trivial but it took a while to reach, especially since root.focus_get() returns a decimal number when printed out

Generally Keeping the Code Clean still a struggle but as I learn more about Tkinter I have made sure to make my code my straightforward and less of a mess

my repo is at: https://github.com/jLukeC/mega-project-list