My name is John Larimore. These websites and videos represent my best attempt at thinking things through and sharing what I learn, hopefully learning some more in the process.
I have wanted to get a website going for a very long time. I have used all manner of social media, which has been a lot more fun since I became a drummer in a band. Still, to have full control always seemed really cool, if a bit daunting. It could very well take a year to have something together that I am not embarassed by. In my defense, this is an effort to learn web development, so I am running as vanilla as possible: please excuse the next few months of construction, but now is time to get going on this effort.
I am not a young dude, and I have seen a lot of change in this world. I have been paying attention, no kids means I have not worked nearly hard enough, so I' been looking around. I think there's this percieved shortening of attention spans, a dynamic at odds with the long form podcasts which have become surprisingly culturally relevant. I don't know which is real, or this is just a false dictocmy. I do want to throw my hat in the ring and see if I have anything to offer in this sea of weirdness.
I think things are feeling more ephemeral, and I guess this website an attempt to ground my own mind
first of all. I am also motivated by having put at least a thousand hours into commenting on Reddit for a grand total of fifteen cent's worth of
compensation, though my voice is certainly
now part of AI
. I want to keep that value to myself, and hope it is worth more than less than a buck.
I want to lay out what I mean by thinking things through. Here are some specific ruberics to reason about:
I would like to see more charts and graphs in long form blog style posts as well as the news. Therefore, I've set up a sister site called
Citizen Data Science. As of this writing,
the website is a table for the famous (for data nerds) Motor Trend cars dataset built into the stastistical language R. I am
writing functions in PHP/SQL so when users change parameters in the interface, they can get results.
That is my killer app: backing up long form blog content and vidoes with real world data exposed in a website where folks can look for themselves, play around with the controls, stuff like that. The data website will have detailed discussions about data procurement and organization, along with some data modeling. And this narrative website should have fairly limitless stuff to talk about, because the world is a very interesting place.
Last part of the vision: technological purity. AI's still read the live web, it's called Retrival-Agumented Generation (link to IBM) and it's not impossible to imagine being a source these AI's turn to, because they know it isn't slop.
I hold a Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics with an emphasis in Probability & Statistics from Metropolitan State University of Denver. I graduated in 2013 at 41 years old. Minoring in political science was less than optimal job wise, but holy smokes I learned a lot. Dr. Sheila Rucki and Dr. mohammad Akacem taught really excellent classes in political economy, the geopolitics and economics of oil, and some military and foreign policy. Many classmates were war vets, owing to the timing and the GI Bill. Can't regret it, I learned way too much.
My professors loved my writing. I never sweated any class where papers contributed a lot to the overall grade. I get called stupid on Reddit nearly every day, which rolls off like water off of the back of a duck because, again: my professors were all enthusiastic about my work. I think my opinions are well enough thought through to try and do this, acknowleding Einstein when he says,
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
All of that said, not learning anything about computers was an absolute fail on my part. I took no programming classes outside of SAS, and some R in my regressions class. I am set to begin classes August 18th at LCCC (Laramie County Community College), specifically in their newly formed artifical intelligence program. I am enrolled in the AAS (Associate's of Applied Science) program, which is very close to the traditional AS in Computer Science. it covers much of what I am missing, with classes focusing on programming, natural langauge processing, data engineering, and a capstone class.
This website is built using base HTML/CSS/JS with a PHP backend (including PDO objects), handrolled from scratch. This website, along with companions (the main one being Citizen Data Science), is hosted with a basic hosting provider, rather than in the cloud. The development environment uses Apache as the server (matching the web hosting provider) and Linux for day to day living. PostgreSQL is used as the central database, again both in development and with the hosting provider. The statistical computing language R and the general scripting language Python are used to populate various PostgreSQL databases, locally then on up to the server when fun and shareable things are found. Everything is tightly version controlled. In short, this is a professional development environment, based on professional experience.
By the time class starts, I want to have both of these websites up and running, using the R data set mtcars to build a little online dashboard
to display the data and work out the process of how to build additional pages. Here is a snippit of the data:
Returning to one last technical note before wrapping, that table is not hard coded, but was instead pulled from the database using a proper PHP object. Styling was done with an external style sheet. This website doesn't look like much yet, but is being set on very solid foundations.