About — philthompson.me

Birds
Mandel

I’m a software developer in the PNW. I enjoy running, bird photography, and tinkering with software.

I hope to publish informative, helpful articles to this blog, as well as document my personal projects.

I can be reached at "phil" at this domain.

PGP

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can be found here at:
https://philthompson.me/about

and on public key servers, such as:
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Public Key

Portfolio

NFL Elo Power Rankings, 2023
- written in Python
- parses Wikipedia data, calculates Elo ratings, and outputs the above linked page
- test harness for adjusting Elo rating model parameters, which backtests the model on several years' worth of NFL games (more than 10 full seasons at the time of writing)
Partial String Match for Birds, 2023
- tested out algorithms for finding partial string matches of bird species names
- I found my algorithm to work well enough, and to run fast enough, for use in smartphone apps (this would fix a gripe I have with the otherwise perfect eBird app)
- implemented the algorithm in JavaScript, and published pages for testing and running the algorithms
- in the above linked post, I outlined the steps taken to develop the algorithm
"Smarter than a Chimp" game, 2023
- a simple JavaScript canvas-based memory game
- the source code is available in its GitHub repository
Calculating the Mandelbrot set with BLA: Bivariate Linear Approximation, 2023
- a JavaScript implementation of BLA for Very Plotter, my web Mandelbrot set viewer
- this was the cutting-edge Mandelbrot set approach, as of May 2023, which was developed by others (see the discussion at fractalforums.org) starting at least as far back as 2021
Advent of Code, 2022
- solved nearly entirely by myself, with python 3, after nearly a month of concentrated effort
- my code is available on GitHub
birds "year in review" and favorites pages, 2022
- created by writing photo metadata into a SQLite database, and then running queries and writing static pages, all with python 3
photography gallery pages, 2021
- these galleries are statically generated with a bash script, including some SQLite for faster re-generation of previously pre-processed gallery content
Water Jars game, 2021
- also added a bare-bones generalized water jars solver page that uses a JavaScript worker
- the source code is available in its GitHub repository
Very Plotter, 2021
- view the Mandelbrot set, and plots of a few mathematical sequences
- uses JavaScript worker threads, the number of which can be updated on-the-fly
- the source code is available in its GitHub repository
rust-calc-term, 2020
- a terminal-based calculator powered by bigdecimal math, written in Rust
qrcodejs, 2018
- a JavaScript page for interactively generating QR codes
- the source code is available in its GitHub repository
this website, 2018
- static site files are mostly generated with bash scripts
- no JavaScript, except for some individual JavaScript-based pages mentioned here
- background on the site generator was provided in a blog post.
- the source code is available in its GitHub repository
screensavejs (interactive, 2018) / harvey.dog (non-interactive, 2016)
- a JavaScript page that paints a blurry rendition of any image file
Javascript toy: black & white box, 2015
- finds a box (many are possible) describing the percentage of black and white pixels, where the text itself is counted
- inspired by the xkcd #688 Self-Description
- also available for fiddling with at jsfiddle

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