While designing a webapp that needs to call a remote API, sometimes the API you actually need to use is too complicated or not even available due to local development access issues (e.g. CORS). It’s times like these you learn to, uh, use something lighter and more accessible.

Sure, there’s plenty of Public APIs you could use for such a purpose, but as a developer I like to take a crack at making my own version of something at least once.

Thus, I created Daaaaave, a simple public API built with PHP.

Welp, it’s been about 4 months since I last rapped at ya about a new web app (Bogdle) I was working on, inspired by the Wordle craze (that has since cooled). I’ve done a lot of work on it, and it’s more or less ready, save for some bugfixes and polish.

The only thing is…it kind of spurred on a bit of a Renaissance in personal web development, and my time has been divided among several projects, delaying the release of Bogdle. I’m calling them all NebApps, because they’re sharing a lot of the same structure and styling, hopefully creating a cohesive set of sites.

My flight of fancy with the domain and blog name “Codaname” is no more. What once was my code and audio blog with a haphazard idea to merge a musical term (“coda”) and some kind of spy reference (“codename”) is now gone…

…and is now just part of my main site, MichaelChadwick.Info!

You remember Boggle, right? Grid of letters, find words, etc. You also are probably aware of Wordle, as it’s arguably the most popular English-langage word guessing game existing right now.

As you can see by the header image, I’ve made some progress on such a thing! However, bugs still need to be squashed, a “new puzzle each day” mechanic needs to be sussed out, and rough edges need to be sanded down. However, how did I even get here?

I present a short introductory post for now…

Once upon a time I created a web app called Audio Hash. It involved low-level audio manipulation in order to take multiple audio files, grab random chunks of them, and then combine them into a sampler of sorts, or a “hash”.

The only problem is…it still doesn’t work (as of 2022-02-11).

It’s now 2022 (or 2020 2, if you’re cheeky), and time for a blog-type announcement dealio: NebyooBlog, formerly here, is finally shutting down…

…so it can be integrated here ;P

The awesome rock band that I play in just (well, recently) released a second album! It’s called Unwound, and it’s a definite sophomore release: similar to the first release, but more experimental.

Over the years, the way I’ve used the Internet has changed: initial discovery through a modem and AOL, creating my own little space on a local ISP’s at /~username, always-on broadband in college, and then residential service that I’ve now had for nearly 2 decades.

Once you’re online all the time, you start using it a lot more. I’ve used the popular services everyone else uses, like Google and Wikipedia, but also toyed with running my own services on some server somewhere, usually shared. Issues of privacy and security are definitely relevant here, but customization and control are even more important to me.

In the past few months, I’ve been able to complete some new music, and I guess making a blog post about that is something people do, so…here it is.

I’m 40 years-old and I’ve been working on dev of some sort or another for two-and-a-half decades. I have a reliable career, but still have time to work on toy projects for fun when I want, and yet lately…I have not been interested.

Now what?

All right. It’s 2021. I’ve been making music since I was a teenager back in the mid-90s. I’m now 40 years-old and have finished dozens of releases in a variety of styles. What else is there to do?

Well, I’m glad I asked myself that!

I first legitimately played a guitar in high school, sometime in the mid-1990s. A friend of mine had brought an acoustic guitar to school for some kind of talent/show-and-tell kind of thing, and I remember being quite impressed. I’d never really had much interest in learning any kind of music instrument up to that point, except for maybe the drums.

However, drums had three issues: s p a c e, price, and loudness. Unfortunately, they required too much of each.

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.

Neither the Portal or Mirror’s Edge theme song, but true all the same: I’m still alive, kicking, and making music. None of that music is ready to drop online just yet, but it’s in the works.

Say hello to Fenchy.

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.