Category: Code

Converting a Deprecated Nest Thermostat into a Photo Gallery

Before we dive in, I should let you know that I’m a designer. I have no business hacking firmware to make devices perform jobs they were never intended for, but I do love tinkering with physical hardware. A few years ago, I wrote about building an Arduino LED strip game and followed that post up with another about a Simon clone built with arcade buttons and a 3D printed case. I’ve also taken on some Raspberry Pi projects, a few simpler Arduino builds, and some home automation. All of those were based on existing code and project plans—no compiled binaries or firmware modifications. So, yes, I was way outside my skill set and comfort zone on this project, but that’s how we learn new things, right?

The Rise of the UX Developer

The engineers call us designers. The UI designers call us developers. The research team calls us when they uncover changes to make in the application. When I started at MailChimp 4½ years ago, my job title was User Experience Designer.

Process of Sublimination

This post turned out a bit longer than I intended. To summarize, I’ve tried several text editors out over the last few months and recently fell in geeky love with Sublime Text 2. It’s a truly amazing new text editor that’s available for OSX, Linux & Windows. Now, on with the story.
In the Beginning… I believe it was the Summer of 2005 when I tried out TextMate for the first time. After a few minutes of playing with it’s project drawer, tabs, regex find, snippets and column select features I was very happy. No more bloated applications from a certain software suite or sub-par minimalist editors. TextMate was a simple, innovative, powerful tool that helped me write a lot of code with very few distractions…

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