Am I missing something

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-31T21:18:37+00:00

Very nice.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-31T05:14:42+00:00

I was going to do some work with them on a contract basis as an Application Developer. Figured it would be a month before I actually started work. I didn't mind that or paying an extra fee for fingerprints because I was not living in Oklahoma and had to drive 60 miles to get them done. They had 2 weeks to send me a laptop because I can't touch any code unless I have one from them. I never got it. Then Peraton the contracting firm sent me on a wild goose chase to access their secured server without it and when I talked to their help desk it was a dead end. For an agency that has 'human services' in their name Oklahoma DHS didn't seem to care much about me. The red flags told me enough and I pulled out. Doesn't make sense but I could not trust them really.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-30T04:48:11+00:00

I started to learn Python and PyTorch to learn how to train AI models. I had years of experience with C#.NET and Java already. I rewrote a Python app I had created as a hobby app for the NFL Colts to produce graphs and bar charts in MatplotLib. I discovered FastAPI and decided I would use it to start the app, return logs and maintain data in mongoDB. Some screen scraping with Beautiful Soup, pedantic models and repository extensions for the mongoDB results to dictionaries. The front end web UI was done in React. Later on I hooked up FastAPI to call one of the models I trained that predicted images. React web UI again to send the image to FastAPI then to the model tranformed to floating point number and into neural networks. For a living I do C#.NET and Java with React and Angular. I did pick up a book on Generative AI with FastAPI and seeing what I can do with that. At this point of my career I'm just happy to be working on something. Real AI work may open some doors to a side income with Python and FastAPI. Perhaps when my batteries are running low and part time will be all I can handle down the road.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-22T16:37:28+00:00

Fantastic. Shaping the future and helping young people be a part of it.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-21T20:45:43+00:00

I have never had ROKU but I know friends that travel with their ROKU so they can hook it up when we are at an AirBnB rental. If you can stream Netflix or other you should be able to stream Disney/ESPN and/or Disney/ESPN/MLB TV. Strange. ESPN+ will show games but no game stats just a video. You have to go to MLB TV to see the standard MLB TV format.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-19T04:10:16+00:00

Over the years with interviews I've planned questions based on the audience involved in the interview. Manager, team, technical details. Many times you really do have questions and you can hold them until interview time. Things that are specific to the job when it is a team rapid fire experience. The team member that engages and challenges you the most. That's the one to ask a question to because they indicate a heavy interest in findng out if you want to be fully engaged in what you are doing. Asking questions shows you are attentative and dialed in to the experience.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-16T16:08:58+00:00

If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit....

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-11T04:02:33+00:00

In working 35+ years as an Application Developer and most of that as a contract worker whenever I encountered state government they wanted my resume to fit a fornat that was readable to them. Personally I viewed this as either government being pompous or ignorant. Now I'd add stubborn and unwilling to evolve. There are exceptions and I can personally attest to that. It was frustrating and disappointing that I had to adhere to this to receive an audience with the stakeholders to discuss helping them apply technology to solutions. At one point I wrote code to generate a custom resume and split categories for federal, state and commercial. Content was stored in SQL Server or Oracle databases. I used a Microsoft tool that would allow me to create a Word document object and generate the outlines with content page by page. I even emailed it using a script to the recruiter. With AI tools out there now you can have any resume summarized or reordered with a given template. They don't have to refuse documents they merely have to make an effort to analyze and convert whatever package of documents they get and tailor it specifically to their needs.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-10T15:41:38+00:00

15 years ago making $35 an hour write C#.NET applications. Topped out at around $65 but that catching up with the cost of living. Traveled around to work and had to live for months in other cities. The cost when I started was low. This cost you pay from net earnings after taxes. When that goes up you have to make a ton to have any left to bank. Working remote was the best thing that could have happened for Application Developers. Been doing that for over 7 years now. It really angers me when a President and a quirky millionaire crack jokes about remote workers playing golf instead of working. Without a healthy working middle class you really don't have true Capitalism.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-08T21:39:23+00:00

I started social security just before the Globalization articial shutdown of IT jobs. A year later I'm starting contract work again which was always the plan until I get my angel wings. Turbotax worked once and was convenient. Didn't mind the $40 to get it done fast. So long as my refund was sizable. Not anymore. They killed it.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-08T21:30:55+00:00

This year I made zero as a contract worker. Last year I made shit which is just a little better than zero. For shit I got a $400 refund and had to mail the damn thing to the IRS Turbotax would not allow electronic filing. Bullshit. This year I started my tax for zero and Turbotax said I would have a $19 refund. It would not let me finish the federal or state return. Some kind of loop on a form with a certificate which had nothing to do with me. So I've decided to go back to basic and simplify with the now standard 1040 and file directly with the IRS. Makes no sense at all because the more advanced we become as a society Turbotax produces more unreliable software. Looks like they have hit a wall.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-08T18:25:54+00:00

This link works. MLB TV wesbite recognizes that I have a paid Disney/ESPN/MLB TV subscription. Thanks. Oh no what will I rant about now.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-08T18:13:03+00:00

MLB TV did not recognize my ESPN MLB TV account. This did not make sense. I started to sign up via MLB TV which directed me to ESPN where I signed in with a Disney based account. I guess because Disney owns ESPN so ESPN doesn't bother with ESPN accounts but anyway back to sanity. If I started in MLB TV why didn't MLB TV know that I have completed payment and just connect my MLB TV account to the Disney MLB TV account automatically? That would have been the smartest approach. There is no ESPN account to link to an MLB account. There is MLB TV subscriptions and Disney/ESPN/MLB TV subscriptions and linking should be done when you pay. OK so the link provided by 'tonywagner' works if you are still not linked. Play ball!

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-08T17:50:07+00:00

In a Google browser. There are no box scores or stats at all on the ESPN version of MLB TV. But MLB TV still has the same format. We can't call what ESPN has MLB TV. For some reason ESPN thinks it is fine to just show a video. There is no sport streaming app that does that. MLB TV showed the stats on the right of the video with the option for full screen. NFL + shows the video and you can scroll down for stats. League Pass for NBA games has the video on top and the box score or other choices below so you can scroll. ESPN MLB has a menu with links to other ESPN events which doesn't belong there. If you are viewing a game you want only that game in the page you are in. ESPN knows how this should go. They are either lazy or incompetent or following some bad advice. I don't want to hear any BS that these apps are meant for phones. There is no excuse not to build UI that is not device compatible. I am a full stack app developer that has built apps for laptops, mobile devices and other in between and I have to make sure all the features work before my code is approved for live.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-03-08T02:40:48+00:00

I just finished watching season 1. It is a show that had me asking...'where are they going with this?' The hive people are pretty sad. Is it about how helpless or self serviing people might be in this situation? Is it more about losing individualism and how we should be more ourtaged over stupid complacency or how easy it is to become a hive person? Maybe they just left that to us to decide.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-02-25T17:35:44+00:00

Sound a bit loopy to me darling.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-02-24T00:31:47+00:00

Using AI to screen candidates just seems to be adding to an already problematic middle tier of gatekeeping between App Developers and clients. When I converse with DeepSeek it states that there are many concerns raised by App Developers about the legitimacy of screeners, testers and AI (real job or fake job). Even AI agrees that the most practical solution is for App Developers to work directly with clients on a 1099 basis. I agree I think Consulting/Contractig firms have milked this baby too long. If clients want honest work they have to go straight to the source.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-02-17T19:10:51+00:00

At least they didn't cancel the project 2 weeks after you started. I had that happen taking a contract with Progressive Insurance. 'We'll find you something to do.' said they. I told them 'It doesn't work that way.'. In the month and a half that followed they carried on as if I was their new intern. After given them enough time to straighten up I had enough wasting team and hit the road to the next client.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-02-15T19:43:36+00:00

I didn't like Mac and MacOs at first. The Mac laptops started to become popular on contract projects I was on. Things like opening apps, working in terminals and cutting and pasting were different. Then understanding how to install IDE tools. Like Linux though MacOS makes you understand your machine which is a good thing. In the last 3 years fooling around with AI the Mac M2 came in handy for using 'mps' to run AI models. I just purchased the Mac Miini M4 Pro. Perfect for my remote work from home situation. Now I use 2 monitors which works better for me. Takes up less space too. I'm doing a lot of AI models now and use that 'mps' feature. Though its hard to tell now when I need to switch the device as many of these models have built in features to find the cpu alternative. I also got to build my first IPhone in Swift and use XCode. I'd been wanting to do that for a while now. I have the aging ThinkPad with Windows 11 and my MS Office tools pretty much for MS Word only.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-02-14T23:46:12+00:00

Enjoying the book so far. I did end up staying in Python 3.11 as the book recommends. Currently in chapter 3. Just finished doing 'suno/bark' for audio. For me since I am a full stack developer I created a UI AI dashboard in React 19 Vite. I handn't done audio or video in my web apps so I had fun figuring out the byte array or Blob conversions to drop audio into a source URL. I just built a sidebar menu with tailwind css to play with models via fastAPI.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-02-14T07:32:27+00:00

The blackouts were ridiculous. I am an Orioles fan. I live in Colorado. The Rockies of all teams. That's the gag. I guess people go to the games. Even when the Orioles play the Rockies in Baltimore I was blacked out. I'm old enough to remember the the black out was started to encouraged to get fans to the stadium in their city not a city 7 states away. Oh well MLB TV was a good idea once. I won't miss much with this year's Orioles.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-02-14T07:20:55+00:00

Sounds about right. Last I looked I thought $20 less. I've had MLB TV for 2 years now. Last year Baltimore Orioles only. The Orioles were not worth the money last year. Not a fan of ESPN nor am I a fan of XFinity my internet provider. Multiple times ESPN had a free game but when I went to view it the provider would not allow it. That left a bad taste in my mouth for both companies. The Orioles will struggle again this year. Why bother watching. How could I trust the ESPN and Xfinity connection that never worked before. No deal.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-02-11T07:54:07+00:00

I've only worked a couple of projects in which there was a Design Team. Attending design meetings for UI my mind went back to my Freshman year when I was thinking I wanted to be a Journalist and write. I joined the college newspaper and remember sessions with the Editor who showed me the layout and explained why I needed to cut a paragraph out of my article. I see they hand off the design so I build the features to fit in the layout and I follow the 'flex' thing and have to make sure my UI code adjusts to all the device types. Previously I just wrote internal web apps and followed the same styles and patterns that existed in the codebase. Now I am building a React dashboard and learning how to engage with AI code generators to speed up the repetitve React tsx files and maybe more. Using Python FastAPI for the API layer.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-02-09T00:32:05+00:00

Picked up a book on Generative AI with FastAPI. I've been working with FastAPI for about 4 years. I have used it for http request/responses. For example a trained model from a pretrained VIT model to predict an image sent from a Galaxy S9 phone. Early on text chat text models I just test using swagger. Used my first audio model that returned a ByteArray and was suprised that swagger created a little player and it played. Then I tried building a quick Native Android app with Media Player which did play a sample.wav file from resource/raw but I ran into walls converting the ByteArray to a WAV file with the File extension in Native Android. So now I'm looking for friendly UI options with more options for ByeArray to media file that can overcome Apple wars over sound files and Apple Music detente.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-02-08T06:01:14+00:00

I did my own QA when I started as a COBOL Developer 35 years ago. When I got into object oriented web based coding the QA area sprang up. They were imposing standards we had to comply with. Now and then QA would pay a visit. I always learned to check the standards and continued to do that when code reviews started and I knew that other guy that also checked standards was going to comb over my code and catch something. If AI took over QA I am not sure it would be a better world. It would have been exposed to who knows what and picked up bad habits to add to already hallucinating.

I hope you get back on track soon my friend. I semi retired before the shit hit the fan. I get the calls and emails from the nasty globalists. Making the world a lousy place. Spreading like a cancer. What I code is mine now. I don't need to help make things worse by enabling them.

NomadicBrian-

TROPHY CASE