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Now

This is a page about what I’m working on right now and generally what I’m up to. It’s inspired by Derek Sivers and the idea of the /Now page.

April 2023

  • Busy with multiple clients and doing some fun government development in addition to the legal stuff I've been working on for a while. Current technologies are Umbraco, .Net 8, MySQL and SQL Server.
  • Started studying for the Azure AZ-900 test. I'm looking solidify my Azure knowledge so I can add more cloud engineer support options to my clients.
  • Working on a new side project that is a SaaS app. The app will allow Azure B2C developers, administrators and portal users to view the custom properties and extension attributes of B2C users. I just finished the Stripe integration and now am working on the part that will integrate with Azure Key Vault to hold the client credentials of each user.
  • Started to take more pictures and make a point to bring my camera with me wherever I go. When I lived in Chicago and NYC I used to take photos everywhere I went. I guess it's when I had a child that taking photos of things that caught my eye kind of took a back seat. Luckily my buddy Jay gave me his old Sony DSC-RX100. This little camera is great for throwing in my back pocket and heading out to do whatever I'm doing.
  • We did our part as Minnesotans and took our spring break in Mexico. We stayed at an all inclusive resort for the first time. It took a couple of days to settle in and get over the 'what the hell did we get ourselves into' attitude. Our little guy LOVED every minute of it and eventually we did too.

March 2023

Getting back to updating my /Now page after it seems I took the winter off from making any updates. In the last couple of months, I’ve launched a few side projects to the public, took a nice vacation to Mexico, and started to focus on trying to get more clients for my software consulting company, msoftware.

Life

The Minnesota winters are long and it helps to get out of the cold for a week or two during these cold months. This year we took a trip to Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Isla is a pretty neat little island about 30 minutes by boat off the coast of Cancun. You get around the island by cab, bike, or golf cart. We rented a golf cart for the week and drove to the beaches and around the island every day. It’s a beautiful place and getting to spend some time in the sun really helps break up the winters here.

Image of Isla Mujeres
Image of Isla Mujeres
Image of Isla Mujeres
Image of Isla Mujeres
Image of Isla Mujeres
Image of Isla Mujeres
Image of Isla Mujeres
Image of Isla Mujeres
Image of Isla Mujeres

Side Projects

  • Armchair Expert Media Explorer – My wife is a big Armchair Expert podcast fan, I think they’re called arm cherries, as she listens to the podcast the hosts, Dax and Monica, talk to their guests about books, podcast, music, and other kinds of media they’re into. This project is our attempt at documenting all the different media that’s talked about during the podcast. Right now it’s all manually captured but in the future, I’d like to implement some Natural language processing to find the media from the podcast transcripts.
  • Today’s Record High App – I’ve been working on different iterations of this app for about a year now. This winter I put my head down to bust out a stable app for both Apple and Android operating systems. The interface was actually designed via ChatGTP. I needed a professional/minimal design for the screens so I asked ChatGTP to "Create me a React Native interface to display the record high, record low, normal high, and normal low for a given date. Display the date and location at the top". Surprisingly this worked out really well. The JSX syntax that was returned turned out to work perfectly. Now that this project is public, I’m going to step away for a little while, even though I have a million ideas of what type of weather data I’d like to see in the app.
  • Migrated both msoftwaredev.com and clintmcmahon.com from WordPress on WP Engine over to the Ghost platform. The migration was pretty easy, I should write a blog post about migrating clintmcmahon.com over as there was some magic that I had to perform to get the images migrated over successfully.

November 2022

Side Projects

  • I’ve been working on a website to display all the various weather records in a single and easy-to-use place. But I’m getting very overwhelmed by all the options out there. There’s so much data but I’m not able to put my finger on what the most important data is for all the different use cases out there. I finally decided to put the big Climate Dashboard on hold and to develop a React Native mobile app for iOS and Android that only displays the record high, normal high, record low, and normal low temperature for a given day for each of the different cities available. Users have the ability to navigate from day to day as well as change the city they want to view. Currently, the app is only available for iOS but I am working on putting together the Android build now.
  • I started building the Armchair Expert Media Explorer as a .Net 6 Razor Pages app. The website hooks into the publicly available Spotify API to gather a list of the Armchair Expert episodes to use as the source list. In addition to the episode list in the Spotify API response, I am also grabbing the episode description and image to display. At the time of this writing, I am in the middle of migrating from my local machine to a dedicated web server that I manage. Hopefully, by December we’ll have a live site up and running.