Adventures of the Penguin Phoenix

Who is the Penguin Phoenix?

The Penguin Phoenix is my nickname for my Toshiba Satellite M20. My adventures into tech started when I installed Linux LXLE on that laptop. This laptop supported my first experiments with web development and data science.

Several years later, I'm making progress as an aspiring full-stack developer, something of a Penguin Phoenix in my own right.


What's on this site?

I've organized a portfolio of my front-end, full-stack, and data science projects. I've also provided links to articles and video tutorials I've written and delivered.

Thanks for taking a look. You can get in touch with me at the links below.

Portfolio

  • Wine Classifier App

    This site hosts a Support Vector Machine (SVM) machine learning model. The user enters a wine review, and the model classifies the wine as one of 5 styles: Dessert & Fortified, Red, Rosé or Rosado, Sparkling, or White. You can read more about this project in the Grapevine Plots article series.

  • Willie McGee

    Build a Tribute Page

    This site profiles Willie McGee, my favorite baseball player.

  • Will Tom Eat It?

    Build a Survey Form

    This site celebrates the Will Tom Eat It? segment on the tastytrade network.

  • Jack's Lanterns

    Build a Product Landing Page

    Halloween is my favorite holiday. After creating this page, I want this company to exist, now.

  • The SeaMonkey Project

    Build a Technical Documentation Page

    I've been a fan of The SeaMonkey Project since the application came pre-installed with LXLE, the distribution I installed on my first Linux laptop.

  • Personal Portfolio Page

    Build a Personal Portfolio Page

    I reimagined the Penguin Phoneix site to meet the requirements of this assignment. I have used this format for other projects, including Grapevine Plots and my Instagram link page.

  • Meet the Mighty Five

    I created this project during my Intro to Web Design course from Tech Talent South. The site celebrates the music of some of my favorite Russian classical composers.

  • JOCKO BOTCAST

    I built the JOCKO BOTCAST to complete my random quote generator assignment for a prior generation of freeCodeCamp curriculum. It pays tribute to the JOCKO PODCAST and sources its content from the podcast's episodes.

  • Wikipedia Search

    This site uses Javascript to render search results from the Wikipedia API.

  • 8-Bit Mario Star Animation

    A CSS-driven animation of 8-bit Mario with his star superpower.

  • Charlie's Links

    Charlie is a five-foot-tall skeleton who sat at my desk as my temp while I was working on a project at the office. Today, he's also my alter ego on Instagram.

Publications

  • Grapevine Plots

    A collection of articles celebrating wine through exploratory data analysis, data visualization, statistics, and machine learning.

  • #MayThe4th by the Numbers

    #MayThe4th By the Numbers: An Analysis of Twitter data celebrating Star Wars Day 2020 A tribute to the final season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

  • The Alphabet of Nations

    How to create an animated GIF from a sequence of scanned JPG images in the Linux Terminal with ImageMagick and Gifsicle.

  • The Penguin Phoenix Philosophy

    What bringing an old laptop back to life with Linux taught me about technology, coding, and myself.

Path to Full-Stack Developer

  • Udacity SUSE Cloud Native Foundations Scholarship

    I received a scholarship from SUSE to complete Udacity's Cloud Native Foundations Program. The course covers how to structure, package, and release an application to a Kubernetes cluster, while using an automated CI/CD pipeline. The top 300 performers earn a scholarship to Udacity's full Cloud Native Application Architecture program at no cost.

  • freeCodeCamp JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures

    This certificate represents about 300 hours of coursework, covering the following topics: Basic JavaScript, ES6, Regular Expressions, Debugging, Basic Data Structures, Basic Algorithm Scripting, Object Oriented Programming, Functional Programming, Intermediate Algorithm Scripting, JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures Projects

  • Python and Flask Bootcamp: Create Websites using Flask

    I enrolled in this course for two reasons. First, I wanted to learn how to deploy Python-based machine-learning models to the Web, and Flask is a popular framework for such applications. Second, I want to build my skills on full-stack frameworks, and Flask was an approachable introduction to working with databases and deploying to Heroku.

  • freeCodeCamp Responsive Web Design

    This certificate represents about 300 hours of coursework, covering the following topics: Basic HTML and HTML5, Basic CSS, Applied Visual Design, Applied Accessibility, Responsive Web Design Principles, CSS Flexbox, CSS Grid, Responsive Web Design Projects

  • Udacity Mobile Web Specialist Nanodegree

    This Nanodegree program introduces students to responsive design and to offline-first features for web sites, such as service workers and IndexedDB. I completed this Nanodegree in October 2018 on the Grow with Google Scholarship. #GrowWithGoogle #GoogleUdacityScholars

  • Grow with Google Challenge

    This Nanodegree program introduces students to responsive design and to offline-first features for web sites, such as service workers and IndexedDB. I completed this Nanodegree in October 2018 on the Grow with Google Scholarship. #GrowWithGoogle #GoogleUdacityScholars

Data Science Studies

  • Microsoft Professional Program Data Science Certificate

    During this program, offered by Microsoft on the edX platform, I explored data visualization and analysis in Excel and PowerBI, programming in R, and machine learning in Microsoft Azure ML.

  • Udacity PyTorch Challenge

    I participated in the PyTorch Scholarship Challenge, sponsored by Udacity and Facebook, from November 2018 to January 2019. I learned how to build, to train, and to deploy state-of-the-art deep learning models with PyTorch. #PytorchUdacityScholar

  • Udacity Secure and Private AI Challenge

    I participated in the Secure and Private AI Scholarship Challenge, sponsored by Udacity and Facebook, from May to August 2019. I learned how to use distributed private data with differential privacy, federated learning, and encrypted computation techniques. I was selected for one of 300 follow-up Nanodegree scholarships. I was part of the lead team for Project T-Shirt. We encouraged students to generate images using AI and machine learning techniques, such as style transfer or GAN. Students voted on their favorites, and we printed the top two images on swag such as t-shirts and mugs. Proceeds will be donated to charity. Please see the gallery below for more detail. #UdacityFacebookScholar #60DaysofUdacity

  • Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)

    I earned the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals certification by passing the AZ-900 exam in July 2019. This exam covers the following skill areas: Azure, Cloud Data, Cloud Networking, Cloud Security, Cloud Services, Cloud Storage, Virtualization

  • IBM COBOL Programming with VSCode

    As much fun as I've had learning new programming languages and platforms, I really enjoyed the chance to get back to the roots of computer science. I remember my dad sharing stories with me about working with COBOL and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis mainframe system. This course offered a unique opportunity to see how those technologies are applied today.

Contact

Feel free to drop me a line from this site. You can get in touch with me through the social media links below.