Past Projects

Pebble Watchfaces

I am the proud owner of a Kickstarter Edition Pebble Smartwatch. It no longer works and I have switched to an Apple Watch, but I truly enjoyed my Pebble. To continue my journey of programming, I decided to write a few watchfaces for my Pebble. You can read more about them here. The most popular one was the Minimal watchface.

Pebble has since been purchased by Fitbit. I put all the code for these watchfaces on my Github account.

My blog

After I built my website (see below), I wanted a place to write about the things I had learned. Naturally, I wanted to build my own solution rather than use another service. It turned out to be a great way to learn some PHP. The entire site consists of two HTML5 files with some PHP, Javascript, and plaintext files on the webserver. I even wrote a script that generates the RSS feed, adds new tags for the files, and uploads all the information to the webserver. I wrote about how I created and updated my blog.

This website

Every mathematician has their own website to display their research, publications, and teaching information. The problem that I had was that the URLs for such sites were always complicated. I wanted an easy and well-branded domain for my site, so I bought thedadams.com and built this website.

Most of what you see here is static, written in HTML5 and CSS3. Very small pieces are dynamic, written in PHP and Javascript. The site is somewhat "responsive," but there is nothing fancy happening. The page reads a slightly different CSS file when the screen size is less that 759 pixels wide (I forgot where I got that number).

The design has been through a few iterations, most recently updated in May 2017.

Consistency Index

I have always been into sports, especially baseball. My father is a big baseball fan and definitely passed that down to me. When I decided to teach myself to program, I waned my first project to involved math and sports. This lead me to invent the Consistency Index (CI).

There are two versions of CI: one for batting average and one for on-base percentage. The general idea is that "streaky" hitters will have long durations when they do well followed by long durations of no success. On the other hand, consistent hitters will have success most of the time with very short periods of no success. The CI uses this idea to attempt to distinguish between hitters that are consistent and inconsistent.

I would like to acknowledge a couple things. First, this is the project I used to teach myself how to program. Therefore, the code is ugly. I hope to eventually clean it up, but for now you can view the project on Github. Secondly, as I have learned more about baseball and statistics, I realize that part of the idea is flawed. For example, there is a weighting, but that weighting is essentially arbitrary. I hope to fix this one day as well.

I wrote a few blog posts about it, which you can see here.