MClare Blog

Six Months of C The past year has brought a lot of changes, not the least of which is that I'm now working primarily in C after a few years of web development in NodeJS/React/general JavaScript land.

Writing a pandas Sidecar for Tauri I'm currently working on a Tauri project that needs to utilize a series of pandas scripts for data cleaning before loading them into my database in Tauri.

Syncing Static Sites with Pulumi Real talk, I still haven't successfully decoupled myself from Digital Ocean (though my Bluehost subscription is finally toast) 🤦‍♀️ like I said I would, but am starting to deploy more projects using Hetzner and Pulumi.

ERDs in Org Mode In the past few months, I've had a number of contracting and side projects crop up that have required a lot of software architecture work, including developing Entity Relationship Diagrams, which I find helpful when planning out a project…

Why is multithreading Selenium lousy on MacOS?

Using uv with Emacs When working in Python, I've traditionally used virtualenvwrapper, but I recently tinkered with some Jupyter widget work, which necessitated installing miniconda as well.

Using Pulumi with Hetzner Consolidating domains and moving cloud providers has been a "TODO" on my org list for quite a while.

Visualizing the Blue Sky Firehose I unfortunately missed the heyday of the Twitter API, but I'd seen a few posts about Jetstream from Simon Willison and Jake Lazaroff, and wanted to do a quick hack visualization with d3, based on this template visualizati…

Simple Map Dashboards with Observable Framework NYC Department of Buildings Active 311 Complaints Previous work After some publicized incidents in NYC with building maintenance lasy year, I threw together an interactive map of all of the complaints lodged…

The Bus Factor From Wikipedia: The bus factor is a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members, derived from the phrase "in case they get hit by a bus".

What's in a conference?

Thwarted for the last time!

Building OSS Map Apps With Observable Framework Motivation I've been a pretty heavy user of Observable since 2021.

Making 3D Hexplots With Maplibre One of the curses I've found about being a software developer is knowing there has to be a way (or a better way) to do something, and then nerd sniping yourself until you figure out how to do the thing.

Debugging Emacs Emacs is made to be modified.

How I Org Overview Org-mode is the reason that emacs won out over vim (though I do dabble in evil-mode) for me when it comes to IDEs.

Do Something; Brag About It I haven't blogged in quite a while.

Mapping Los Angeles' Soft-Story Retrofit Program Los Angeles' Soft-Story Retrofits Motivation In the wake of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that devasted parts of Turkey, a lot of press in the U.S. turned to what could happen if a similarly sized earthquake…

Making a Bloom Filter Keyboard The original idea Both of us have an interest in building and tinkering, and at the beginning of the pandemic, Shae convinced Maryanne to subscribe to get all kinds of gadgets through ADABOX with Adafruit.

Adapting a Bloom Filter to Rust I like little productivity minders, particularly when they're a separate "thing" from one of my screens (and less likely to get buried in window management).

Visualizing EC3's EPD Database The data I wanted to create a data visualization of the current state of the EC3 Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) database (provided by Building Transparency) to allow users to get a better overview of their current o…

From Structural to Software I've nearly finished up my search for a full-time purely software role, targeting full-stack positions at small to mid-sized companies.

Prototyping Web Applications With Speckle Motivation I recently finished reading Scott Young's book, Ultralearning, and one of the principles that I really identified with was "Directness" which promotes Project-Based Learning as a tactic for getting stuff

A Long Overdue Year in Review The last time I wrote a post like this, I'd weathered an additional six months at my job (as well as the ongoing pandemic).

This blog post is nearly 4 years old as of January 2026.

Adventures in Cold Emailing (and a Bit of Shameless Self-Promotion) I've been interested in data visualization since the NY Times made it a staple of their reporting.

Building Bridge.watch Motivation I like building tools that are broadly useful and informative.

Building IfcOpenShell on MacOS Building someone else's CPP libraries is never high on my list of fun things to do, since it often goes particularly pear-shaped on Mac due to unknown symlinks (and it can be difficult to chase down which flags need to be set

Dynamic Menu Creation in Blender During my current batch at the Recurse Center, I've been exploring Blender as the UI for a constraint solver I rewrote in Cython.

Why Structural Engineers Use Excel Anyone who follows me on Twitter (or knows me IRL) knows that I have a deep-seated dislike of Microsoft Excel.

Recurse Center - Then and Now The first time I attended the Recurse Center was in the fall of 2019, shortly before I moved from the east to the west coast.

Why I Left Structural Engineering If this is your first visit to the blog, I'll point you to a brief introduction to structural engineering, about what I did do, before deciding to leave this industry.

A Year of Professional Development - Pandemic Edition A friend recently asked me for updates to the final cost of some of the events/professional development based on my previous blog post, so some of the information will be a repeat.

Tinky Care When I first started programming, I was stuck in the desert of despair for a good number of months.

Why I Hate Jargon During the COVID times, I've been in an IRC reading group for Richard Hamming's The Art of Doing Science And Engineering: Learning To Learn.

Further Adventures in Cython Profiling Profiling Tools After getting some criticism on my last post, I decided to dig a bit deeper into best profiling tools for Python/Cython.

Performance Comparison Across Three Languages ETA: The developer of Kangaroo2 (the C# implementation I've noted below) has informed me that his solver differs from ShapeOp in several key ways (so it's more of the same family of algorithms rather than a di…

Dotnet Development in Emacs I'm a little past the one year mark of using Emacs as my default text editor/IDE/super organizer, which means I have developed opinions about what I want out of a program (mainly one that will do ALL THE THINGS).

Visualizing Geometry in Hypar Hypar is one of the new(er) kids in the AEC startup space, so I've spent a bit of my free time exploring its capabilities through the lens of structural engineering in the last few weeks.

Building a Tiny Pomodoro Timer One of my new hobbies during the pandemic has been playing around with Raspberry Pis and getting more into electronics.

RET-My Time at the Recurse Center It's been nearly 3 months since I've "never graduated" from the Recurse Center, which has given me some time to reflect on the experience.

A Year of Professional Development I recently got a job offer with a company that I'm very excited about, and one of the fringe benefits they offer is full support for professional development.

My Parents Still Don't Understand What I Do The title of this entry was used as a square on networking bingo card for a structural engineering group that I'm a part of, as a facetious nod to how few people understand what structural engineers actually do…

WiMLDS/PyLadies Scikit-Learn Open Source Sprint Today I spent the day at the Microsoft offices near Times Square participating in an open source sprint for the scikit-learn Python library organized by the NYC chapters of Women in Machine Learning and Data…