Has it really been almost three years since I last rapped at ya? I think the post title explains it best: I’ve been working at work on work, and so not much personal coding has occurred.

Say hello to Fench.

For the April 2020 RPM Challenge, I decided to make a new persona. It’s my pop rock persona, for making songs with actual lyrics and singing. And a month-long deadline to get my first release done seemed like as good a time as any to go forward with it.

You may have heard of COVID-19, a novel coronavirus that’s sweeping the globe. Welp, what it means for me so far is working from home, schools closed, and a general unrest and fear of The Outside.

Some basic info, to catch up for many years of no blogging:

• I’m about to turn 39 in a few days
• I have a daughter who recently turned 5
• I’m going to celebrate my 10 year wedding anniversary next month
• I still program (https://github.com/michaelchadwick)
• I still work by the beach (https://scripps.ucsd.edu), and have since mid-2016
• I’m still in a band (https://flylikevenus.com)
• I still make my own music, too (https://nebyoolae.com)
• I still own a dog, who is now almost 9 years old

I haven’t been putting a lot of work into making music lately, but I have been tinkering with a new site that catalogs all the works I’ve done over the last 20+ years.

It’s not done yet (still needs a copious amount of tedious data entry), but it’s worth checking out.

https://music.nebyoolae.com

Whoa! Fly Like Venus got its album reviewed. And it’s so nice! <3

http://jamsphere.com/reviews/fly-like-venus-scenes-ultimate-rock-thrill

Since my last post, I’ve worked on Raffler quite a bit (it got its own domain, for one), making it warmer, juicier, and with a nice glaze around the edges. In sum, it’s approximately 476% better.

It’s now ready to unveil publicly, after a beta test at UCCSC, a rad tech conference recently held at UC San Diego, so let’s dig into it and discuss some things that changed since last we raffled items in a random fashion.

Solo: Nebyoolae – Close to the Metal

Band: Fly Like Venus – Scenes

A few months ago one of my favorite podcasts ended. I was actually on Composer Quest a few times as a guest, and the host even stayed with me for a night during his World Tour. All in all, Charlie made a very cool thing, and I’ll miss it.

I recently completed a new web app called Raffler that lets you take a list of items (usually names) and then “raffle” them (i.e. randomly choose one). It’s an extension of an older web app I made called Just Pick One, but except for some neat animation I added on the front-end design, the back-end logic was largely the same as always: one big honkin’ funcs.js file full of global variables and methods. Bad Mike, I know, I know, but it’s just how I function when I build from scratch.

However, I know it’s “wrong” and I should adapt to modern development standards, so after a couple months of on-and-off toying with this new app, I finally modularized it in a more manageable state, but the journey was somewhat perilous as I ventured into the World of Javascript in 2017.