Ely += Tech

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I spent this weekend at Fiddling Fool in Seattle.  What an amazing time!  16 hours of dancing later, I’m full of fresh insights on dance mechanics.  Between job hunting, this week is going to be all about expanding The Dancerator’s scope to include some of the wonkier dances that were left out the first go ‘round.  Who knows, I might even squeeze in some time for deployment.

What I worked on yesterday: building a browser extension in the spirit of Cloud to Butt or Millennials to Snake People, but with user-determined terms.  The page above is the Monty Python Wikipedia page when the extension is turned on.

I'm taking a brief break from the Dancerator to focus on job search prep. To keep from getting rusty (and because it's fun), I'm also working on a small project modeling the movie Inception using various Python data structures. Here's my favorite bit of code from the project so far:

paradox = "a dream within a dream" plot = paradox.join(paradox.split("a dream")) print plot

Can you guess what it produces? Answer after the cut.

Career day tomorrow!  I’m so excited!

I know an update is long overdue - I’m planning a long one in the next couple of days.  For now, a thought on the video visualizer:

For the past month, I’ve gone back and forth on whether or not I should use video clips in the app.  The clips aren’t particularly useful for contra dancers - we all know what a swing looks like, and seeing a disjointed mashup of individual moves from several dances strung together doesn’t actually tell an informed user much.

I ultimately decided to include the clips anyway - I needed something to demonstrate to an uninformed user what the words on the screen mean, and the clips were the fastest way to do that.  I also got to explore the minefield that is video on the web, which could prove to be useful later (if for no other reason than because I now know how unpleasant it is to work with video in web browsers).

Now that the video clips are up and running, I’m extremely glad they’re there.  While I’ve still got big dreams for many features to come, the app now feels whole in a way it didn’t without the visualizer.

Unexpectedly, creating this feature turned out to be my most emotional experience so far at Hackbright.  It was wonderful to spend a day poring through videos of my DC, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore friends having a blast dancing, but it was hard not to dwell on the fact that I haven’t seen most of those people in months and I miss them enormously.