Writing

How a $1 driveway find became a ten-year garage adventure with my dad.

It’s been a while since I posted an update – the past few months have been busy with life things (first time home owner + renovations, moving, etc.). The Self-Driving Car program wrapped up nicely in May, which was really exciting. Ultimately, I ended up training a real-time traffic light identifier using the TensorFlow Object […]

We’ve kicked off development of the final project for the Udacity Self-Driving Car Program. You can follow along in the repo here. I’ll follow up with a more comprehensive post once we finish up. In the meantime, feel free to reach out if you have any questions at tim.lapinskas@gmail.com!

It didn’t take long to finish up the first two projects of Term 3 (here and here). I’ve now moved on to the final project of the Nanodegree. The final project is a group project with 5 other students, so we’re in a bit of a wait state right now. We’ll most likely kick off […]

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted. I wanted to share that I’ve successfully completed Term 2! Super stoked to have completed a bit ahead of schedule (I finished Term 2 in mid-December), and to move on to Term 3 starting in a couple days here. It looks like I’ll be wrapping this all […]

Yesterday evening, I went through the PID Control lesson taught by Sebastian Thrun. In relation to the previous lessons of Term 2, I found this one to be much more consumable. Most likely due to its simplicity. Hearing Sebastian say that a version of PID Control is built in to many of the Google self-driving […]

Term 2 is moving along fairly quickly in comparison to Term 1. I just completed the third project (Kidnapped Vehicle Project) and will most likely wrap up the term mid-December. It’s interesting that the pace has slowed – although I would say the content is a bit more strenuous in terms of what we are […]

The July 2017 cohort has officially kicked off Term 2, and I am super stoked to be back working on some challenging problems in the self-driving car space. This term is all about sensors, localization, and control. Sensors meaning reading and gleaning meaningful insights from LIDAR and radar data (e.g. predicting velocity and position by […]

I successfully completed Term 1 of Udacity’s SDCND! What a grind for three months – a thrilling grind though. It was extremely satisfying to receive the final email saying I passed the last project of the term. The past two weeks, I’ve spent relaxing and taking some time away from programming. Well, somewhat of a […]

I’m a about two-thirds the way through the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree and it’s been awesome to be learning at a very rapid pace. In the past four weeks, I turned in two separate projects (here and here). Both were definitely challenging projects, but have taught me a lot about the process of training a deep […]

It’s been a whirlwind of a first month working on Udacity’s Self Driving Car Nanodegree. We’ve covered everything from finding lane lines to neural networks to TensorFlow. I’ve struggled with switching from Ruby to Python, applying basic mathematics, and picking up TensorFlow syntax, but wouldn’t take back a second of it all. I think the […]

I wrapped up my final Ruby project a couple weeks ago – apologies for a delay on the update. As a refresher, the goal was to build an auto updating baseball scoreboard using AJAX. I learned tons during the projects and you can check out the code on Github here. That is only a small […]

I’m still working my way through the AJAX project and having a ton of fun learning about API calls in Rails (httparty for the win). The AJAX part isn’t too difficult to pickup, so hopefully I’ll have it wrapped up fairly soon. The more difficult part was calling the Sportradar MLB v6 API and parsing through […]

Last week, I finished up my first JavaScript application using NodeJS for the backend and vanilla JavaScript for the front end. It was a great learning exercise, especially since I completed my first application with authentication (local and Facebook login). If you want to check out the code, head over to Github here. I’m moving […]

I kicked off development for my new project last week and made a ton of headwind with planning and connecting first API (woohoo!). Check out the repository here. The goal is to create a service where users can search and play music from a variety of sources (YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify). This past week, I got […]

It’s been at least two weeks since I last updated the blog, and I definitely didn’t finish the role mapping application the week after my last update. Documentation ended up pushing that date out a little bit. But, today I finished up the whole project and all of the code is sitting on Github. It […]

Work is goin smoothly. I’m still putting together the planning for the UltiPro / Active Directory project, and most importantly we need to get stakeholders aligned before we start creating the integration. That should happen sometime early next week hopefully. In the meantime, I’m meeting with the Solutions Architect to go over some of the […]

Seems like I’m updating on weekly intervals right now. I have a couple updates. The first is that the work project for connecting UltiPro to Active Directory (and most likely other systems) isn’t going to be done in Ruby and Rails. Our team does most of their data integration using Pentaho (Kettle/Spoon). So, it looks […]

We are essentially finished with the role mapping project, which will be finalized when all of the personas are created. Right now though, the majority of the work is complete and the team seems super happy with the results. Unfortunately, I haven’t finished the role mapping application or had time to work on it further. […]

This is somewhat of a spontaneous update and a pretty large deviation from the work that I had been doing on the Odin Project website building out a sample blogging application. Last week, I updated about how I was working on quite a few different things at work. One of those was to perform some […]

It’s been a little bit since I posted last (sorry about that) so this will be a bit of an update about how things are going with work and learning Ruby on Rails. I’ll start with the Ruby app I’m building. For starters, it’s been hard enough to squeeze in time to code with the […]

The end of last week and today were spent learning about databases (relational databases mostly). I was stoked to get started on the databases sections because I’ve been wanting to actually use SQL forever. The tutorial was seriously just a fly by and nothing more. I could have spent hours and hours working through ALL […]

Today is day 2 at the new job. It’s funny how working in a new role will change your perceptions about a certain part of a business. In this case it was IT for me. I’ll be honest, I had a fairly negative perception about what it means to work in IT. That’s starting to […]

It’s been a fairly slow week over here, but I promised an update about the job and where I’m at in the Web 101 course on The Odin Project website. So, I’ll start with the new gig. I was fortunate to land an IT Project Manager consulting position at Amy’s Kitchen (Amy’s burritos, frozen foods, […]

The end of this week has been spent going through introductory Ruby tutorials. It’s been a lot of fun to see the parallels between JavaScript and Ruby. I’ve always heard that syntax between languages doesn’t differ much, and this is proving it. Plus, Ruby simplifies so much of what JavaScript can do away with. Every […]

Last week was a bit slow, but I turned that around today. I got started on my first true JavaScript/jQuery project. The goal was to create an etch-a-sketch remake using only HTML/CSS/JS or jQuery. It ended up being a ton of fun to create my own version. It truly tied in all of the concepts […]

Well, I’m officially back from Southeast Asia. Check out my Instagram page if you want to see some pictures and notes from the 3 months abroad. As you could have probably noticed, I didn’t update the blog much at all. It’s probably for the best that I wasn’t coding during my time there haha. Anyway, […]

It’s been a while since I posted on my blog (busy traveling SEA). Today though, I’m taking the day to rest. This includes some light JavaScript reading (continuing the YDKJS series) and watching some Netflix. By the way, if you haven’t watched Westworld on HBO go do it now. Anyway, back to the point of […]

I just finished the first book in the YDKJS series and highly recommend it. I know I know, I shouldn’t be reading or studying so much while abroad, but I can’t help myself. I have to say the book is extremely informative for any beginner. You’re quickly run through JS basics (much faster than Codecademy) […]

I should have mentioned this in one of the first few posts, but I failed to write it down here. Last week, I began my 3 month journey through Southeast Asia. I brought a tablet to do some more reading on JavaScript. I hope I get some downtime to read at least the first book […]

Today I kept going full steam ahead with JavaScript objects. It was awesome to have a small refresher after taking a break over the weekend, and also fun to learn some new concepts. One of the first was going over for/in loops again, which are pretty useful loops. For / In Loops to print properties from […]

Objects and methods. I had a grueling day with these two today. It’s been pretty cool to see everything together using objects and methods. Essentially everything I’ve learned so far was put into the tutorials I went through today. Variables, comparison operators, if/else statements, etc. were all included. Let’s dive into some syntax. Just as […]

Objects. Today, I spent a ton of time learning about JavaScript objects. w3schools argues that once you understand objects, you understand JavaScript (we’ll see about that haha). I’m spending quite a bit of extra time on the JavaScript track through The Odin Project because I believe JavaScript is going to be uberrrrr important for any web […]

Not quite overload, but I’m still diving deep into the world of Javascript. The most important part in my eyes right now is syntax. Operators (math, comparison, etc.) were covered in a previous post, so I’ll cover other examples in this post. Variables (think like algebra back in middle school) var x = 5 var […]

I didn’t have a chance to update from last Friday, so I’ll update everything I have done since then. I wrapped up the Codecademy Learn Javascript course on Friday, which was a great introduction to the world of Javascript. I’m still a little weary of the teaching style within their console, but I seem to have […]

Today was split between two sessions: 1. finishing up the Google Homepage remake and 2. further introduction to Javascript. I’ll run through the Google Homepage part first since it was the most exciting. I woke up extremely motivated to wrap up the Google Homepage, which you can find here. It was honestly so much fun […]

Quick update after taking a long weekend to go see the college boys in Los Angeles. So great to see all of them. Today was pretty productive. I kept going through the Chrome Dev Tools tutorial and accidentally went through ALL of the lessons. The Odin Project recommended only the first two sections since I don’t […]

The past two days have been spent wrapping up a week long stint on HTML/CSS. It was honestly a great week and gave me a chance to truly dive deep into the world of HTML/CSS, which gives me a solid foundation to continue working upon. I’ll continue to revisit in the future and am contemplating just […]

Continuing on the html / css barrage via Code Academy. This is all recommendation from the Odin Project and it’s so so helpful. I have somewhat a stigma against in-browser tutorials, but have found that I am learning and absorbing if I’m giving enough attention to the material. It’s easy to get lazy within in-browser […]

Spent part of Saturday continuing the Web Dev 101 track from The Odin Project. I’m spending a lot more time on the HTML/CSS side of things that I thought I would, but it’s so so helpful. Probably put in around 4-5 hours this weekend, and will continue on that track this week! And my Mom […]

tl;dr: Blah blah blah, want to be a ruby / RoR developer. Spent time working at Rinse, LINE, Renovate America out of college. Currently have basic knowledge of the command line, text editors, git, and html/css. Oh, and Michael Hartl is awesome. I really didn’t consider starting a blog about this journey until I started […]