While staying in the Design Concepts San Francisco office for a couple months, I was sleeping in a bedroom in the back of the office. Though the commute in the morning was amazing, I would usually wait until I heard someone coming into the office and walking up the stairs before I would jump out of bed and make it look like I was working before they reached the top of the stairs. Inevitably, some days I wouldn’t be quick enough and they would catch emerging from my nook.

Part of the Hangbot Project, I developed a bit of code for rendering images in a format that the plotter could reproduce. The program takes an image and converts it into a single continuous line.

While working on a client project at Design Concepts, I needed to take a couple timelapse videos and because of how long they were going to take, it only made sense for them be be running concurrently. I looked around a bit for existing software options, but had a hard time finding anything that could do exactly what I needed, so I decided to code it up myself!

Due to a couple projects that I had coded for work that involved large volumes of image captures, the hard drive of my computer was starting to fill up fast. Though I was fairly certain where this huge pockets of data storage were, with 230 GB on my computer, I figured there had to be other areas I didn’t know about. In Window Explorer, you can see file size, but it doesn’t let you view the size of the folders and all the files that they contain, and even though I love numbers, processing all of that in my head is more tedious than I wanted. What I needed was a heat map that would allow you to quickly navigate through the file structure and identify where heavy pockets of data were being stored.

After moving to the Bay Area, I was excited to be so close to Yosemite, which hosts some of the best rock climbing in the world. But what I didn't realized until climbing season came around was that getting a campsite in Yosemite Valley is near impossible. While in the Valley, I talked with a Park Ranger who explained that campsites are released to the reservation website 6 months prior to their reservation date and are filled almost immediately. When people cancel their reservations, it gets kicked back onto the website and becomes available to the public, but is usually picked up again in 15 minutes by someone sitting at their computer hitting refresh on their web browser periodically. But according to the Ranger, this is the best way to try and get a campsite. Of course, as soon as my roommate Drew and I heard this, we thought 'There must be a way to automate the monitoring process so we can know the moment those sites become available...'.