A new habit for November 2020
I care about the environment, so I do not litter. I like to believe most people are like this, but I still see litter in every neighborhood of Portland, OR. When my team and I visited Tokyo to present at Connected Ink 2020, I was impressed by how clean the roads and sidewalks are in Tokyo. I had heard of this aspect of Japanese culture, but it was amazing to experience in person.
Voting November 2020
Why do you care? You probably don’t. This is mostly for me to reflect. My current beliefs Decided The top three traits I seek in a candidate are: integrity, leadership, and effectiveness. I am strongly convinced that the electoral college should be abolished and we should switch to a ranked voting system. The government should increase environmental regulations to prevent climate change and provide more incentives for alternative energy production.
Making this site accessible
Background I attended Women Who Code Portland’s Design Study Night Online: Accessibility Design Principles and Strategies. I learned a few things. I have known some basics for years now, like always set the alt text. What I learned Color contrast is important. There are tools that measure contrast. WebAIM has a great contrast checker. Structure is (more) important (than I thought). I know better than to use an h1 just because I want large text.
My money mistake: ESPP
Background I am in the fortunate position of having an employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) available to me. The popular advice is to wait for the buy, then turn around and sell. I always told myself I would follow this advice. I didn’t. Here is what I should have done. 2 July: Let the ESPP execute: buy $6,867.72 ÷ ($87.04 × 85%)1 = 92 stocks ($6,806.528) 6 July: Sell stocks at opening price 92 × $88.
Beacon Bits
Summary Beacon Bits is a tool for system administrators and other IT professionals. My team submitted this project at MangoHacks 2016 and won the Best Use of Amazon Web Services prize. A Beacon is a small, WiFi-enabled device that submits information about the network to a cloud-based service. Administrators can see the data from a website. The rest of my team used an Arduino UNO as our development beacon. We used the Johnny-Five framework to diagnose the network by measuring ping rates and upload and download speeds.
Eating vegan at Chipotle
Choosing to consume a plant-based diet can be inconvenient. The greatest inconvenience might be finding a quick bite wherever you are. I am vegan and worked at Chipotle last year. It is my duty to help you master ordering food at Chipotle. First off, if you are anxious, I recommend ordering online. You can pick everything you want and get it when you are ready without having to wait through the line.
Sherlink Holmes
Summary Sherlink helps users find the next article to read on Wikipedia. Usually when you visit Wikipedia, you are trying to learn as much as you can in the smallest amount of time… or you are wasting time going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Sherlink helps you stay on track by analyzing the article you are reading and using analytics provided by MediaWiki (which is the software that makes Wikipedia).
Initial Commit
README Author Alex Ordonez About Full-time student studying computer science. Loves education, Linux, open source software, hackathons, and sustainability.
Team With Me
Summary My team and I worked on this project during our first hackathon. Unfortunately the project was not finished. However, the experience was worth it and introduced me to Android apps—and hackathons! During the hackathon, our team handled many new difficulties—such as working with multiple people on a git repository, all contributors accidentally uploading generated files. Three-quarters of our team also exposed ourselves to Parse for the first time, as well as using a third-party (Parse’s) SDK within an Android project.
MicroManage
Summary Developed during UHacks 2015. MicroManage aims to solve the problem of forgetting to remind others. Our team sympathized with each other with a common problem: someone says “Hey, remind me to do X later today," or “Can you text me to get Y so I remember when I go to the store tomorrow?" That’s dumb. Why not just set a reminder right then and there? The person asking to be reminded might very well be a busy person.