joshavant

I want to build a large format, real-time, physical music visualizer that could orchestrate an artistic light symphony for any song.

I'm imagining physical visualizers that are columns of multiple, discrete light nodes, each able to have variable brightness and color.

The real-time music processing is the hard part (for me) to crack.

There's some standard tricks here: FFTs, bandpass filters, etc.

But I want to do more: Real-time stem separation, time signature and downbeat tracking, etc.

Imagine hearing Sweet Caroline and, when the horns kick in, the whole installation 'focuses' on the horns and bright yellow light jumps between each column on each horn note, before returning to tracking the bass line or something.

I've been noodling on this idea for a long time and slowly digging into the music and CS fundamentals. The rise of LLMs might finally be the piece that enables me to close my intelligence gap and finally build this thing...

Here's my strategy:

- Setup VMs locally, on your development machine. (This eliminates the cost of hosting but gives you all the technical learning opportunities). My development machine is macOS and UTM has been an excellent app to manage these VMs. You can eventually model your VM's configuration around what resources your VPS will have on AWS/DO (e.g. 1GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, etc).

- Learn the basics of Ansible, in order to provision a server (local or remote). I did the course on KodeKloud.com and found it great to getting me going quickly.

- Write Ansible playbooks to provision your local VM as you would want your VPS on AWS/DO/etc to work. Ansible Galaxy is a repository of many community-supplied roles for common tasks/services. You could consult these for best practices on building your own playbooks or totally offload provisioning onto those roles.

- Once you're comfortable getting your local VM setup, point your Ansible playbook at an AWS/DO VM and put it online!

My high-level roadmap has been to build my own Ansible playbook to provision a Ubuntu server to CIS Level 2.

CIS benchmarks define security controls for a few of the more common aspects of DevOps work (e.g. Ubuntu OS hardening, AWS account security, Docker host, etc). They're freely available and there's many well-maintained scripts that can both audit and provision your host to the standard. I've been using the benchmarks as an easy to way to self-teach security aspects (and validate I've done it correctly). Level 2 is the standard used to handle financial information and medical records, so it's probably the most secure you'll ever need to go.

Once I have a provisioning playbook to stand up a secure host with some services (Nginx, Redis, etc), the next goal on my roadmap is learn Terraform to configure + deploy a personal cloud of services to AWS/DO/etc.

Similarly, Google purchased reCaptcha and ended up harnessing the stream of human interaction into that to, among other things, classify all of their Street View content (e.g. select the stop lights/bridges/license plates/etc).

I've hesitated to ever attempt this because every residential ISP I've had refuses to offer static IP addresses.

As well, deploying a server in a Google/Amazon/Microsoft datacenter which could be surreptitiously monitored defeats the theoretical privacy aspects of on-premises mail server hosting inside one's personal residence.

However, today, I looked into the newish movement of 'confidential computing' in the cloud (where data in motion - e.g., in memory - is encrypted and cannot be observed from the OS or hypervisor).

I openly wonder if one solution, then, is to build a secure VM that acts as a simple forwarding proxy to one's home server, gets assigned a static IP from a datacenter, and is deployed on one of these confidential computing instances, ensuring full E2E data privacy and data control?

Any guesses?

I got a job at 'early' Tinder (2014) after someone I chatted with on a Freenode programming channel went on to become one of its cofounders.

When I worked at Apple, it was fun to walk in some buildings and notice the California 'cancer warning' sign posted in the lobby. From that, you knew there was probably a hardware engineering lab somewhere in that building, because I believe they had to post those due to carcinogens released from soldering. (And, inside of Apple, that kind of knowledge would only be shared on a need-to-know basis, otherwise.)

I'm a front-end developer.

I'd like an OSS solution that will allow me to deploy an arbitrary server-side service - be it a Ruby, Python application or even a package like OpenVPN - to some cloud infrastructure, easily.

This solution should spin up a hardened OS distro (CIS-compliant, maybe?), provision it with my arbitrary services (using Ansible or Chef or something), and deploy it to AWS or some cloud infrastructure for me (using Terraform or something).

All these component pieces exist, but nothing ties all of them together for an easy deploy for a front-end developer like me.

(And, I know things like Heroku and CodeDeploy exist, but I dislike lock-in and they nearly universally come with their own restrictions, like lack of support for server-side Swift applications or custom services like OpenVPN or git-annex.)

EDIT - I'm strongly considering taking some time off to write this soon, so get in touch if this is something you're interested in! Contributing or using!

Ah! I noticed this interior layout in more than a few buildings but didn't realize the backstory. Thanks for posting!

I'm moving to Austin soon and currently trying to get a grasp on local salaries.

Would you mind adding your years of experience ?

I'd appreciate the update!

I'm moving to Austin soon and currently trying to get a grasp on local salaries.

Would you mind adding your years of experience and what parts of the stack you're working in (iOS, Rails, 'full stack')?

I'd appreciate the update!

I assumed this was happening through their acquisition of Rapportive and all the authorized Gmail plugins that came with that. But this... this is sneaky.