This website is a virtual proof that I'm awesome http://www.spotts.dev/ My experience with 9/10 classes completed - About a year and a half ago I started the Masters of Science in Data Science program at Eastern University. I chose this program because the total cost of attendance was affordable, and the program schedule is very flexible for working professionals. I had some apprehension about the program due... Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.spotts.dev/2026-02-27-eastern-msds/ http://www.spotts.dev/2026-02-27-eastern-msds/ A quick guide to adding Font Awesome - I recently gave my website a much-needed facelift, and I wanted to add icons inside the “Highlights” section to distinguish featured projects and blog posts. I didn’t want to use emojis because they felt a little too casual and out of place. After a little bit of Google searching, I... Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2025-10-16-font-awesome/ http://www.spotts.dev/2025-10-16-font-awesome/ Ideas from Clean Code Chapter 8 by Robert Martin - Our engineering team is progressing through Clean Code by Robert Martin, and one of the chapters that I’ve found most interesting so far is Chapter 8 where he talks about boundaries. One of the things Robert Martin calls attention to is the fact that our applications are often an amalgamation... Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2024-08-03-code-boundaries/ http://www.spotts.dev/2024-08-03-code-boundaries/ Creating SSL certificates for a GoDaddy hosted WordPress site - The only experience I have with setting up a website is my experience setting up this website using GitHub Pages. There are a lot of features that GitHub gives you right out of the box if you use GitHub Pages, one of which being the checkbox to enforce HTTPS when... Sun, 28 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2024-07-28-go-daddy-ssl/ http://www.spotts.dev/2024-07-28-go-daddy-ssl/ Reading the first few chapters of Clean Code by Robert Martin - Our broader engineering team recently started reading Clean Code by Robert Martin, and while some of his opinions seems to be strongly contested within the software engineering world, he is still seen as a thought-leader for writing good software and following reasonable practices. Two of the chapters that stood out... Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2024-06-25-clean-code-comments/ http://www.spotts.dev/2024-06-25-clean-code-comments/ A solution for large, data intensive apps - I have been working on a large Dash Plotly application, and it was becoming really unwieldy to manage all the code for the application in one app.py file. I initially tried to pull some code into a separate file containing Dash elements needed on the page, but this felt like... Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2024-03-24-dash-multipages/ http://www.spotts.dev/2024-03-24-dash-multipages/ An attitude shift towards having a long term project - Over the last two years, my GitHub has mostly been a collection of repositories where I have demoed or experimented with different technologies that piqued my interest. A lot of the repositories I created during that time had a handful of commits, and then I swiftly abandoned them to move... Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2024-03-19-long-term-projects/ http://www.spotts.dev/2024-03-19-long-term-projects/ A thorough and concise resource for learning Python - I’ve been working on leveling up my Python programming, and a friend recommended I check out the book Think Python by Allen B. Downey. The second edition of the book is available free online as a PDF, so I grabbed a copy and checked it out. At first, I was... Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.spotts.dev/2024-03-10-thinkpython2/ http://www.spotts.dev/2024-03-10-thinkpython2/ My experience of awestruck and frustration - Someone in the r/datascience subreddit mentioned a tool called Noterous, which uses AI to generate Python notebooks and create data visualizations. The OP in the subreddit said they are using it to create Plotly visualizations more easily with AI, and since I have been spending a lot of time using... Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.spotts.dev/2024-02-04-noterous/ http://www.spotts.dev/2024-02-04-noterous/ A lightweight solution to visualizing DataFrames - I recently started a project where I wanted to integrate a lightweight framework into my Python application to display data visualizations. I first tinkered around with converting my project into a Flask app, but without a lot of experience with HTML and CSS, I was finding it difficult to get... Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.spotts.dev/2024-01-23-dash/ http://www.spotts.dev/2024-01-23-dash/ Switching from the GitHub subdomain to a custom domain in roughly an hour - I’ve been wanting to purchase a custom domain name for my personal website since I first started it, but I wasn’t totally sure where I wanted to register it or what I wanted to call it, plus I was a little intimidated by the thought of having to get deep... Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.spotts.dev/2024-01-06-custom-domain/ http://www.spotts.dev/2024-01-06-custom-domain/ My thoughts on the program and what I got out of it - I recently passed the exam for the NASM Certified Nutrition Coaching certificate. Nutrition is something I have been really interested in for quite some time now, and I originally got the idea to complete the program because I wanted to be able to sort though all the conflicting information about... Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.spotts.dev/2023-12-05-nasm-cnc-cert/ http://www.spotts.dev/2023-12-05-nasm-cnc-cert/ How I got this work on my site - When I first got my website running I was annoyed that I didn’t have an image to show on the browser tabs, but I had bigger things to tackle so I pushed that aside as something I would figure out later. Over a year later, I finally got to a... Sat, 28 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2023-10-28-favicon-images/ http://www.spotts.dev/2023-10-28-favicon-images/ My experience implementing it on my website - The other day when I was working on my website, I had a question about whether I could embed Google Analytics into the site to collect analytics data about the web traffic the site is receiving. I’ve worked with Google Analytics before at a previous job, but only as a... Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2023-10-24-google-analytics/ http://www.spotts.dev/2023-10-24-google-analytics/ A simple and safe way to store project credentials - I recently encountered Encrypted Credentials in Ruby on Rails as a method for storing encrypted credentials in your Rails project. It allows you to store and edit important credentials needed by your application without having to check passwords in plain text, and it makes it easier to share the credentials... Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2023-10-20-encrypted-creds-rails/ http://www.spotts.dev/2023-10-20-encrypted-creds-rails/ I tried GraphQL, and I really liked it - I was perusing the Ruby on Rails courses on Udemy recently and came across a course on using GraphQL with Ruby on Rails. It was a short hour, and a half of video content, so I purchased it and followed along with the videos. The course instructor, Alex Deva, does... Fri, 13 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2023-10-13-using-graphql/ http://www.spotts.dev/2023-10-13-using-graphql/ An interesting thing I picked up learning Ruby - I’ve spent a lot of time working on increasing my knowledge of Ruby on Rails recently, and I had someone explain to me the three different ways to iterate through maps in Ruby. I was super excited about this because up until this point I thought there was only one... Thu, 12 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2023-10-12-ruby-maps/ http://www.spotts.dev/2023-10-12-ruby-maps/ A few things I found puzzling, yet very powerful - I didn’t have any experience with Ruby on Rails prior to joining eSpark Learning, and I’ve been learning it on the go by jumping into our Rails projects to make contributions. Though I have worked with a few other object oriented programming languages in the past, Ruby on Rails feels... Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2023-09-16-confusing-rails-variables/ http://www.spotts.dev/2023-09-16-confusing-rails-variables/ Why too many tickets in progress is distracting and ineffective - I recently took a short course on the Scrum Alliance website to fulfill part of my Scrum Education Units (SEU) requirement called “How Successful Teams Limit Work In Progress”. This course really resonated with me because the anti-patterns that they discuss in the course are all things I have experienced... Thu, 03 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2023-08-03-limiting-wip/ http://www.spotts.dev/2023-08-03-limiting-wip/ What I learned after much researching - I got my Certified Scrum Master certification a little over a year ago, and I recently got an email from the Scrum Alliance asking whether I had been studying Scrum. This is what the email body looked like: Truthfully I wasn’t doing anything in particular besides reading articles I came... Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.spotts.dev/2023-08-01-renewing-csm-cert/ http://www.spotts.dev/2023-08-01-renewing-csm-cert/