Eric Carmichael's posts

Diablo 2 OCR

If you can believe it: a few neat tools I made to get better items in the game Diablo 2 are the bedrock of my programming career.

This post is about the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool I made to pickup “good items” in D2 and encouraging kids to pursue weird passions.

Posted on 2021 Jan

First impressions: Digital Ocean App Platform

When I first learned about the new Digital Ocean App Platform, I was pretty excited to see Heroku have some competition! We use Heroku on many projects and love its simplicity, but hate how quickly it can get expensive.

I attempted to set up one of our client’s projects on this new platform to give it a spin. Here is my experience.

Posted on 2020 Nov

CloudCube (S3) in Django on Heroku

Have you ever wanted to have persistent storage for your Heroku app because ephemeral storage was just not cutting it?

Posted on 2020 Mar

Stress

We added a baby to the family and CKC has never had more opportunities, but at the same time my stress levels have never been higher.

How am I dealing with this!?

Posted on 2019 Jun

Our process

We’re agile! Often times we have to conform to our client’s workflow and fold ourselves in, but below we’ll describe our ideal process.

Posted on 2019 Apr

How do I get a web dev gig?

I thought I’d take a moment today to talk about what it takes to make it as a lowly web developer :)

Posted on 2019 Mar

Heroku vs AWS

Heroku.. almost a bad word in many circles. It’s expensive, polished, and restrictive. To me: it’s like the Apple of hosting providers. I can rely on it to “just work” the vast, vast majority of the time.

Posted on 2019 Mar

Bitcoin and disruption

Like many companies, CKC has been infested with at least one of “those guys” who are way into Bitcoin. (looking at you Eric)

In this post: what Bitcoin is and how CKC hopes to make innovative, disruptive, and buzz-wordy applications based on this newfangled digital platform. Eric’s appreciation for Bitcoin was magnified by impactful experiences while doing work for the United Nations.

Posted on 2019 Feb

Optimizing Heroku Django Memory

This week we’re writing about a particularly tech detailed situation we have with a client. The symptoms: architecture that has slowed down and behaving poorly. There are warnings about too much memory usage, requests are timing out after 30 seconds — causing some pages to be completely unresponsive for clients with more than 300 offices.

Posted on 2019 Jan

Who are we?

We’re a lean, agile, jack-of-all-trades mix of nerds (that happen to be software developers). The team has experience working with Microsoft Research, Google, University of Paris, The United Nations, CERN, etc.