As we come to a close for the 2025 year, I thought I would give an update on the site and some things to come in 2026. I'm gonna ramble a bit here and talk some technical aspects of the site as well, so feel free to skip through if something doesn't make sense.
As many of you know, this site was started as a place to host some of the projects I had been working on. I have it listed on my resume, so the next time I'm applying for software engineer jobs I hope I am asked about it. I am happy with the progress we made this year and thank you all for continuing to support it. This site makes no money as we don't have ads and don't plan to add any. It also doesn't really cost much to upkeep either. I initially started by hosting on an AWS ec2 server on the one-year free tier. I migrated off of this when my free tier ran out, to save the 5 dollars or so a month. We are now fully hosted on my home desktop, which comes with some funny challenges. When I was out of town and the site broke I had to FaceTime my girlfriend and walk her through the steps to get the site back up. A few weeks ago I was trying to get BattleField 6 installed but ended up breaking my computer and had to physically take it apart to reset it. I kind of like it this way though, I think it is funny that if I press the physical button next to me it will shut down the website.
Because of this, and the fact that I am going out of office for the rest of 2025, we may have some unexpected down time where I am unable to fix the site until early next year. My apologies if anything occurs and temporarily brings down a blog you like. I think I have the setup correct though that I will still be able to publish blogs from my laptop for the next weeks.
I am pleased to see the positive support the blog is getting. I wanted to add a place for some longer form content and updates (like this one) but also allow for my friends to guest write whatever they wanted. There has been some great feedback to articles and requests for new features. I posted Fuller's article this week on Reddit and it was getting a lot of love but the mods deleted it for some reason. Lame.
"Lol. This made me chuckle." - reddit user
"If I could give this article more likes, I would" - other reddit user
Astute blog fans will notice that we recently added support for view count (feel free to keep refreshing your page to boost your numbers) and link preview when sending on iMessage. These are both possible by moving the javascript from client side to server side, before loading the page. I was able to refactor the existing backend server that was used to handle authorization for the Power Hour app, and now it handles loading blog posts as well. This will make it much easier to expand the feature set and I should have more features to come in the new year.
I've talked in depth about the Johnson Index in previous blogs so I won't go into detail here. I'm happy with how few issues it had this year and will continue to improve the metrics for next season. My goal is to have a rankings system that is fair and gives some insights missed by the AP or CFP.
One project that doesn't get a ton of love is the College Basketball Picks. My goal here was to have something that looks at every division 1 game, including some colleges I have never heard of. I think in the next few months I will try to retrain the model to:
- Pick spreads as opposed to straight up
- Be trained on more regular season data as opposed to only March Madness data.
Picking spreads will obviously make the accuracy numbers go down but will make it more fun I think.
The Power Hour app is a personal favorite and labor of love. It was the first web app I made a few years ago and I'm glad I was able to get it hosted here. Planning to engage in some Christmas Power Hours in the next few weeks, let me know if you want to try it out and I can add you to the list.
As of now I don't have any great ideas for new projects. Contrary to what some people may tell you, I am still fully employed and anything on here is done because I want to see a project through end to end. If it's not fun for me to work on or I'm not proud of it then what's the point? Thankfully this is all still fun to me. Thanks for reading, I appreciate you all. Cheers to a great 2025 and I hope you all have an even better 2026.