Alex C. Viana's Blog

I'm from the generation that still complains about the death of Google Reader.

Back in 2020–2021 I ran a short-lived newsletter on Substack called Alex's Newsletter.

I made a bunch of big changes to my blog to kick off 2026.

I recently had to perform some "git surgery" to rebuild the main branch of a repository I was working on.

This post is about a fun little command-line utility I made with ChatGPT's help to randomly generate exercises from Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies" in an aesthetically pleasing presentation.

Early in the pandemic I got a Raspberry Pi and set it up to run Pi-Hole as an ad blocker on my home network.

I took the last few weeks off of blogging to focus on some other projects.

This week as part of my consulting work I’ve been working on evaluation metrics for LLM-powered text extraction.

This week's update is again focused on technical content.

I didn't get an update out last week because I've been heads down on some projects.

I feel like this weekly update experiment is coming along.

This is the summary of what I was up to in the 10th week of my sabbatical.

This is my 3rd weekly sabbatical summary and I'm happy with how this series is shaping up.

... the most important thing is to have fun!

Like most bloggers, I have a long backlog of unfinished posts.

Over the years, I've had four different technical blogs.

What Do You Mean?

Last July I was the guest on a data leadership podcast called "The Data Chief".

With ChatGPT's help, I wrote a command line script that loops over a play-along jazz track starting at a random point each time.

What are Embeddings is an excellent long-form primer on the topic of embeddings - vector representations of data used for deep learning applications.

I'm 9 months into my self-directed study of math and I wanted to start writing about some of the problems I enjoyed working on.

Hieroglyphics and Pictures Math is just a picture which you can understand hidden in hieroglyphics which you don't understand.

Hello, Manjaro!!

This year I've working on gaining a deeper understanding of AI and ML tools.

I want to do more intention self-directed study in 2023.

This year I finally accomplished a dream of mine - I only did a single day of the annual Advent of Code challenge.

I'm coming off an 11-day break for the winter holidays.

A friend of mine tipped me off to a neat little project called the Coconut programming language.

David Owen's "Where The Water Goes" follows the author along the length of the Colorado River as he narrates the complex legal, economic, and environmental issues around water usage.

I recently came across a Hacker News thread on the Crystal programming language that piqued my interest.

I recently came across a great blog post by Simon Willison (creator of Datasette) digging into a recent academic paper comparing OLAP workloads on SQLite against DuckDB.

I figured out how to turn on a "dark mode" toggle.

I'm starting this blog with some experiments with 100-word posts.

Hello, welcome back, and thanks for reading!

Hello and welcome back!

I recently discovered most of what I've arrived at (in addition to a bunch of other stuff) is covered by Claudio Jolowicz's excellent (and wonderfully illustrated) Hypermodern Python series.

Let's start with why we bothered to build a documentation system in the first place instead of just taking ad-hoc notes.

It seems that every 4 years I get the itch to write a tech blog.

<center> </center> How to Talk to your Analysts about Regex Alex Viana - 05/05/17 The following is a presentation I gave to some non-techincal collegues at work to help them get started on reading and writing regex expressions.

I organize a weekly series of tech talks at work.

This post is intended to accompany a presentation I gave to the Baltimore Python Meetup on Wednesday, March 15th 2017.

This is a short post about how I set up my pelican project to deploy with GitHub pages.

I spent 12 hours on a plane this week traveling between the East Coast and San Fransisco for the RSA conference.

<center>I've listed Erik Bray(GitHub) as a co-author on this post.

Lately I've been doing a lot (millions) of calculations involving small NumPy arrays of HST PSFs.

Update 01/30/2014: Adam has split his gaussfitter code off into it's own GitHub repository here ("PR's Welcome!").

It's Time to Think about Performance Lately at work I've been thinking a lot about the performance of my code.

The Moving Target Pipeline group at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland seeks a graduate or undergraduate student for a paid summer internship through the Institute's Space Astronomy Summer Program (SASP).

Earlier this month the wonderful Randall Munroe at XKCD posted this great strip poking fun at the decrease in commit message quality as a project ages.

Why Log Files?