Stan Nelson - Coder's Haven

Hackathon: GPT4-x-Alpaca Part 2: Creating a MUD with Evennia

In part 1 of the hackathon I participated in at work, I set up the GPT4-x-Alpaca LLM with Oobabooga in an AWS EC2 instance. Next up in my hackathon journey was an attempt to make the LLM do something useful and fun. I've been casually interested in creating a Multi-User

Hackathon

Hackathon: GPT4-x-Alpaca Part 1: Oobabooga and LLaMa.cpp

Ever since ChatGPT hit the scene, it seems to be all that anyone is talking about. I participated in a hackathon at work last week and was able to spend some time playing around with Large Language Models (LLM for short). Specifically, I was looking for something that could be

Hackathon

Hackathon: Building a Dungeon Crawler with Godot

Earlier this year, there was finally an opportunity for another hackathon at work and this time I decided to try to build a game in a week. I’ve been working a bit with Godot, the open-source game engine that’s been growing in popularity recently. My experience has been

Golang

Using Go Modules

Go Modules is the official dependency management solution for the Go programming language. Recently, I finally converted over my personal projects. I had been putting it off for some time, since I was waiting for the Go team to finalize everything and work out all the kinks. Go 1.11

Golang

Hackathon: Training a Blackjack AI

When I attended AWS re:Invent at the end of 2019, I attended a workshop for using machine learning via Amazon SageMaker to teach an AI how to play blackjack. Seeing as re:Invent was held in Vegas, I decided to take the spirit of Vegas home with me and

AWS

AWS re:Invent 2019

Another late post, but that's just how it goes. I attended AWS re:Invent with some collegues back in December of 2019 in Las Vegas. The conference spans multiple hotels on the main strip and has something like 70-80k attendees. Since it was my first time attending, I wasn't really

Golang

Hackathon: Using Go on an Arduino

This is waaaay overdue, but we had another hackathon at work back in September of last year and even though I'm waaaay behind on blog posts, I wanted to make sure I did a short writeup on my project. During Gophercon, I received a small Arduino Nano 33 IoT. Not

Golang

Graceful Shutdown of a Go Service

I recently spent some time figuring out how to gracefully shut down a Go service. The goal was to allow in-flight transactions to complete successfully before shutting down, but return Unavailable for any new requests. I found the solution to be fairly straightforward for Linux, but a little bit more

Golang

Gophercon 2019

Another year and another Gophercon, this time in sunny San Diego! As usual, there were a lot of high quality talks across a breadth of subjects. I highly recommend browsing through the Gophercon videos on YouTube, but I'll highlight what I thought were the interesting bits below. The last year

GameDev

Tiled in Unity using SuperTiled2Unity

My brother and I are in the early stages of development and design for a game we are making together. He's the genius artist and I'm the programmer guy. Everything in-between we share, including map making. There's an excellent free tool called Tiled that can be used to make 2D

Python

Hackathon: Generating Fake Test Data with Python

We had yet another hackathon at work. This time around, I wanted to do something with Python. Since we have a gap in test data at work, I decided to create a script to generate oodles of fake test data using a Python library called Faker. It has a number

Golang

Hackathon: Tello Drone, Go, and Lua

When the theme for our latest company hackathon was revealed to be "Need for Speed", I went straight to Best Buy after work and picked up a DJI Tello drone. I had been wanting one ever since I went to Gophercon and saw the presentation by Ron Evans

Golang

Multi-platform Makefile for Go

Something that Go does very well is multi-platform support. You can build a binary for just about any system without much hassle. On a single build machine, you can build binaries for Windows, macOS, and many flavors of Linux. All that is required is to change the GOOS and GOARCH

Golang

Worker Pool to Limit Concurrent Goroutines

Recently, I had the need to process a near infinite number of messages asynchronously. You can't just throw all the messages into separate goroutines when there are that many of them and more incoming. One solution is to use some sort of worker pool to manage the number of concurrent

Golang

Gophercon 2018

I had the privilege again this year to fly out to Denver and attend Gophercon, the premier gathering of "gophers" (people who program in Go). It's a lot of fun and I learn something every time. After spending the weekend hanging out around town with my wife, enjoying

Python

Hackathon: DNN Service

A couple weeks ago, we had another hackathon at work. This time, I wanted to create something useful that could potentially be adapted by one of our teams. My initial thought was to convert some of our old C++ code to Go and remove a Windows dependency, but after talking

Programming

Microsoft Acquires GitHub

Earlier today, Microsoft announced they are acquiring GitHub, the popular git hosting solution that everyone uses. At least, it feels like everyone uses it. Here's the announcement from GitHub. I use GitHub and I really like it. It seems to be an integral part of the Go ecosystem and open

Golang

Hackathon: Conway's Game of Life

Recently, I had the pleasure of participating in an internal hackathon at work. They gave us two days to create whatever we wanted with whatever group of coworkers. There were no specific guidelines on what the project had to be or what technologies it needed to use, so I decided

AWS

Setting up a Ghost blog on Amazon AWS

UPDATE: I switched from hosting Ghost on AWS EC2 to hosting it on AWS Lightsail. Lightsail is great for a smaller blog like this and makes configuration a breeze. Here's a link to the steps: https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com/ls/docs/en_us/articles/amazon-lightsail-quick-start-guide-ghost If it wasn't immediately

Technology

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...SpaceX?

Last Friday, I was on my way home from a road trip with my sister when we saw something extraordinary in the night sky. We had no idea what it was at first. Was it a near miss asteroid? A missile test? Rocket launch? Aliens?! My sister took a short

Programming

The Beginning of the Blog

Back in July of 2017, I attended Gophercon. Gophercon is a con for Gophers, or rather, people who enjoy programming in Go (or Golang). My company switched me over to Go from C# in January of the same year. Turns out, Go is a nifty little language and I quite