from brodan import Blog

Dynamic Aspect Ratio Detection With FFmpeg

This week I've been working on a challenging new feature for one of GIPHY's GIF creation tools. The goal is to detect every aspect ratio change of a long-form video, which is useful for videos such as smart-phone videos that contain a combination of vertical and horizontal video. Here's an

ethereum

How to Run a Private (Local) Ethereum Network with Go Ethereum

I've been learning more and more about Ethereum lately and I wanted to solidify some of my understandings by running an Ethereum node locally. I ran into several issues along the way due to a combination of less-than-helpful documentation and super outdated Stack Exchange and Medium posts. In this post

NFT

Learning NFT Generation By Example: An Open-Source Success Story

Lately I've been heads down on a generative NFT PFP project and working heavily with a Node.js tool called sharp. sharp is a high-speed image processing library that's useful for image converting, resizing, extraction, etc. GitHub - lovell/sharp: High performance Node.js image processing, the fastest module to

NFT

Learning NFT Provenance by Example: A Bored Ape Investigation

I was recently approached by an artist friend of mine to help them build and launch an NFT collection using their artwork. I've never worked with smart contracts or any of the NFT-related technologies, so I've been learning all of it myself. One concept that I found particularly interesting was

ghost

How to Hide the Ghost Blog Subscribe Button

Ghost is the platform I use to host this blog, and I love it. It has everything I need. However, I recently came across my first gripe/bug with Ghost. The BugThe issue is that the 'Subscribe' buttons can not be hidden from the page despite the 'Subscription access' setting

python

Logging S3 Download Progress with Python and Boto3

This post demonstrates how to log the download progress of an S3 object at self-defined intervals using Python's built-in logger and without any additional third-party libraries (besides boto3). At the time of this writing I'm using boto3 version 1.18.2 and Python version 3.9.1. The full source

tattooing

8 AAPI Tattoo Artists You Should Support and Follow This Month (And Every Month After).

A personally curated list of eight exceptional AAPI tattoo artists.

react

Rendering a Custom Font Dynamically with React + TypeScript

This past week at GIPHY I was working on an interesting feature for one our creation tools. The tool needed to allow the user to upload a font file and then render a preview of that font. Various Google and StackOverflow searches led me down a number of paths but

illustrator

On Learning Adobe Illustrator

In an effort to start doing some of my own design work for my pin company, Pingrove Press, I finally took another crack at learning Adobe Illustrator and how to work with the dreaded pen tool. The pen tool has perplexed me ever since I first encountered it in a

web monetization

How To Monetize a Ghost Blog with Web Monetization

This post is going to be quick and easy. Web Monetization (WM) helps you get paid for your content. You can learn all about it on https://webmonetization.org/. If you use Ghost for your CMS/blog like I do, there's an easy way to integrate WM into all of

command line

betty: A Slightly Better cp

betty is a simple command line tool which combines the functionality of cp and mkdir into one command.

tattooing

Brodan's Tattoo Compendium

Brodan's tattoo collection from 2014-present.

toreba

On Winning Toreba

I've won ten prizes on Toreba to date, and I have the receipts to prove it.

python

Configuring a .pypirc File for Easier Python Packaging

Today I published a new blog post on my Truveris's engineering blog on how to configure a .pypirc file to simplify Python packaging. You can read the post here: Configuring a .pypirc File for Easier Python Packaging If you have any questions or feedback on the post, reach out to

tattooing

7 Color Tattoo Artists You Should Have Already Emailed

In a previous iteration of this post (which you can read here) I presented 9 kickass blackwork tattoo artists, all of whom should be capable of meeting anyone's blackwork tattooing needs. In this iteration, I'll discuss a bunch of the best color tattoo artists I've ever encountered. As with the

nodejs

Verify Travis CI Webhook Notifications with Node.js

Travis CI allows users to configure webhook notifications which can be sent during certain build events. I recently played with this feature in order to send SMS messages via Twilio whenever a project failed to build/test. This post will discuss how to validate these webhook notifications to ensure that

python

Parsing CSV Files with Python's DictReader

I had an interview today (spoiler: I didn't get an offer), and one of the rounds of my interview involved refactoring some poorly written Python code. In this code was a function that parsed a CSV file and returned all the rows with columns matching some arbitrary input values. The

twilio

Building Twilio MMS Bots

I recently wrote two short tutorials for this awesome project called hack.guides() which is run by pluralsight. These posts are intended to cover identical material in two different langauges (ruby and python). You can view both of these tutorials here: Build a Futurama Quote-bot with Twilio MMS, Morbotron, and

osx

Symlink Directories on OSX

The OSX version of the ln command behaves differently than the GNU version. As a result, I could not figure out a way to correctly symlink an entire directory (and its contents) on OSX. Here's a quick solution to this problem: This command will install and allow you to use

music

Music For a Hranj Day 004: Local Band Spotlight

Sometimes when the weather sucks and you're feeling down, you want to find something new to cheer you up. The focus of this post is to highlight a number of local bands that I believe deserve recognition. Hopefully the bands in this list will be new to you and you'll

hackNY

A hackNY Week 1 Recap

It's absolutely crazy to believe that I'm already halfway through my hackNY Fellowship summer. I can finally say that I've gotten to know all of this year's fellows and it's such an honor to be able to associate myself with this group of people. hackNY recently published their article on

git

Squashing Git Commits Using 'git rebase'

There's many times when collaborating on Git that you may need to combine, or "squash" multiple commits into a single commit. For example, the repository I'm currently working on at my internship with BuzzFeed has 8,500+ commits and hundreds of open pull requests at any given time.

tattooing

9 Blackwork Tattoo Artists You Should Have Already Emailed

In honor of my recent offer for an internship position at the Internet's viral vestibule BuzzFeed, I've decided to write a post in the style of a BuzzFeed list. This post is going to highlight a number incredible tattoo artists that focus exclusively on blackwork. The title of this article

music

Music For a Hranj Day 003: The Concept of "The Good Album"

Today's weather calls for another installation of "Music For a Hranj Day". However, in this chapter I'm not going to provide the usual recommended listening for a day of crappy weather. This post is going to explore a concept that my band, Save Face, joked about to the

Using Environment Variables with Chicago Boss

Chicago Boss is an awesome web framework built on top of the functional programming language Erlang. While working on a web application with CB that used the Twilio API, I needed a way to store sensitive data that could be accessed from any module in my application. Essentially I wanted