I've worked for my father's business, Abacus Consulting Serivces, since 2015. At Abacus, we build what our customers need. In practice,
that's usually simple web sites and serices. Sometimes it gets a bit more involved, but we like to keep it simple whenever possible.
At Abacus, we
I've worked on a few big projects over the years (and a lot of small ones)
My father David has been a homebrewer since the mid 90's. He hopes to open a local brewery
in our hometown this summer (2021). Back in 2017, he started adding some valves and sensors to his
brewing rig. This sparked a project between the two of us to build a modular Brewery Control System. It involed me writing
low-level device drivers for the hardware we use (RS-485, ModBus RTU, etc.) as well as a web API and interface to control it all.
A project of this scale is a lot for 2 people; we've made a lot of progress, but it's far from done. We have an orginazation Github
(NavasotaBrewing) that hosts all of our code.
The drivers and backed are written in Rust, and the front end is VueJS.
Another project due to my father... he teaches Project Management and DevOps at Texas A&M. His final exam had his students spinning up Microsoft
Azure VMs and doing some basic SysAdmin work in them. He needed a way to verify that all of his students performed some easily verfiable tasks
(installing Git and Python, changing environment variables, starting webservers, etc).
Due to the large number of students, checking each VM by hand was impractical. I wrote a Rust testing framework that could grade each students final
as they worked. They could run our program (written with Rubric) inside their VMs, where it would collect the relevant information about its
environment and send a report back to us. Because it had the grading criteria baked in, the students knew their grade every time they used it to evaluate
their VM. We got positive reception from the students, and grading 60+ finals took less than an hour.
We realized the potential of this project and I made it a bit more flexible. It, like most projects, is still under construction. We hope to use it again
in the coming semesters. See the Github repository for more details and some documentation.
This is a tiny project. I'm real tired of starting my Raspberry Pi with the intention of connecting over SSH, only to find the IP changed. I
really don't like having to dig out a monitor and keyboard just to run ifconfig. This is just a short Rust program that DMs the Pi's
IP address to me over Discord. This, and a few more tiny projects, on my Github.