I have been drinking from the firehose on astrophotography. Collecting as much data as the weather will allow. I stayed focused only on M31 until I felt like I had all of the technology/automation pieces of astrophotography working well. Right now I have a rock solid and reliable setup that can image all night. So I’ve taken a bunch of shots on M31 as a result. I’ve moved on to other targets now, but I wanted to share my latest and greatest shot on M31....
Seeking Truth
I have a tween whom, on a daily basis, fully reminds me that she has both an amazing intellect and, frustratingly, a personality like my own. Because she’s smart she has a lot of command over the English language, and won’t hesitate to use that gift to twist an statement on its side to “score points” in an argument. I mean, how dare she. That’s my move! This frequently has me repeating the phrase, “live in the real world”, as a plea to return to ground truth....
M31
Well, I’ve gotten into this hobby of astrophotogrophy (find out more about that here). I took this photo across 3 hours in one night with LRGB filters. 90 frames of Luminance, 30 frames of R, G, and B each. All at 60 second exposures. I’m quite happy with the result given it’s the very first integration I’ve actually done. From what I can tell the low-hanging fruit to improve this is:...
The Best Version of Myself
This is a somewhat therapeutic post for me. I’m writing this a few days removed from a company retreat called Elevate. Thirty individuals were selected across the company for executive training and personal investment. This event, its backdrop, the (amazing) people in attendance, and other things I’m processing in my life have put me into a bit of an introspective state in my downtime between Elevate and continuing on to Prague to visit my team there....
Management Guidance
Much like my last post which outlines my guidance to individuals that are part of the engineering teams I lead I have made a similar set for managers that I work with. Hopefully there is some use to you in there somewhere. A Guide to Effective Team Management Navigating the journey from an individual contributor to a manager is akin to treading unfamiliar territory. It requires growth, adaptation, and the wisdom to strike a balance between individuality and universally valuable managerial practices....
Team
Below is a copy of the text I provide to everyone who works on one of my teams. It’s intended to be high-level overview of what I care about and, thus, ultimately how my style of running teams manifests itself. I’ll note that I consider it a living document and when bringing someone onto the team I ask them what they like/don’t like about it. That feedback process is actually really useful....
rOpenBCI
As part of my experiments with EEG I had the need to create a Rust library for interacting with my OpenBCI headset. rOpenBCI is a project I created and open sourced. This project is pretty raw and could use some more effort to make it more configuration-friendly/flexible. I’ve open sourced it in hopes that whomever else might benefit from it can use it as a foundation for what they need. If you have any questions about it feel free to connect with me or open an issue/pull request....
It's Back
Welcome. It’s been a while since this site was anything more than a splash screen. A while back I reached out to a friend of mine to see if he could build a design for my site. I wanted to refresh the site a bit and start blogging again. What you see is the result. I hope to be posting here more frequently. Mostly about random projects I’ve got going on....