"I am always looking for a challenge. One where I can use the skills and knowledge that I already have and yet still grow and learn."
This has been my objective for decades. I have often thought that I needed to change it, update it, reword it, modernize it, something. Every time I update my resume I look at it again, and every time I leave it alone. Why? Because it is every bit as true, accurate, and descriptive of me today as it was then. I am not one to sit still. I am always studying, keeping up with new technologies, and seeing how I can apply new skills to the world around me. Feel free to browse through my list of skills and experiences but know that if the skill you seek is not there now, it may be there tomorrow.
Below are some of my contributions back to the open source community:
https://www.npmjs.com/~kyle138
https://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Owner/Kyle138/1
Everyone turns an old Pentium III desktop into a webserver just for fun right? Well there's no point in a web server with nothing to serve so I whipped up a blog. One of my other hobbies is attempting to keep a mid-80s motorcycle on the road, thus Project Nighthawk was begun. The blog these days no longer resides on an old P3 but has been migrated into AWS.
Read more about how Project Nighthawk is hosted today here.
Do you, or someone you know, work 40 or 80 hours per pay period? Are you expected to hit EXACTLY 40 or 80 hours with no allowance for overtime? Are you tired of calculating exactly how many hours and minutes you have left to work and when you should clock out to make exactly 80 hours? Well so was I and that's why I made this form.
Firefox had a powerful plugin called GreaseMonkey which allowed you to inject javascript locally into any webpage before it gets loaded. Chrome now offers this same functionality natively and GreaseMonkey changed its implementation and then ViolentMonkey came along. Anyways, there are hundreds of practical uses for this sort of thing, such as creating an autorefresh for a page or simply adding a Next button to pages that increment, but I tend to use it instead for entertainment. I get fun ideas for scripts that don't serve any real purpose other than as programming diversions for myself and a few seconds of jockularity for the friends that I talk into downloading them. My scripts used to be hosted at userscripts.org before it went offline, but you can find them for now on the Userscripts-mirror.
Below are some examples:
April Fools is one of my favorite holidays, I've mailed my sister a fake court summons, GIMPed a tattoo on my neck and quietly posted online, but one of my best foolishments was Fun Cat Facts! in 2012. I found a great python script that interfaced with the Google Voice API and would allow me to send SMS texts from the command line. I had a second Google Voice number that none of my friends or family knew about so I whipped up a cron job to send a different Fun Cat Fact to my victims ever hour, on the hour, beginning at midnight on April 1st. I had one friend who figured it out early on but the rest didn't figure me out until late that evening. I did have a few ask me for advice on how to block texts though. Below are the list of Fun Cat Facts I made up for the service, there are more than 24 as my victims spanned multiple timezones and some hours received a bonus Fun Cat Fact.
Keeping in character I'm developing my own Serverless solution using AWS S3, CloudFront, and Lambda to host my photos. -Stay tuned!