I build things.

Empirical evidence of short term 'momentum' in the NHL?

Comebacks vs. blown leads in overtime games.

My exploration of SDQL continues, and as before I’ve just been working to pick up the basics of the query language. ‘Momentum’ is an oft debated concept in sports. The question this time is: Do teams that blow leads typically also lose the game in overtime? In other words, does a team charging through a comeback carry that ‘momentum’ into overtime? Using KillerSports.com as my source (the data goes back to 2006) and filtering for regular season only I decided to look at teams winning percentages in overtime when holding a given lead after one or two periods of play.

Posted by Mike Apted Saturday, January 16, 2016

Q: How safe is a lead after each period in the NHL?

A: Reasonably to very.

After discovering SDQL I’ve been working to pick up the basics of the query language. Best to start with something easy and work up from there I figure, so the first question I wondered was: How safe is a lead after each period in the NHL? Using KillerSports.com as my source (the data goes back to 2006) and filtering for regular season only that answer seems to be: Pretty safe.

Posted by Mike Apted Thursday, January 7, 2016

Normalizing deviance

Why bad decisions become accepted convention.

During the break I read an interesting article (?) by Dan Luu on normalizing deviance, which is the process of culturally accepting small things we know instinctively to be wrong in pursuit of some short term trade off. Over time that exerts pressure on new members of the culture to accept those mistakes, as it becomes prohibitive to spend political capital in combating them. Eventually, these cut corners become foundational and wind up manifesting as the root cause of some catastrophe that (hopefully) spurs the needed cultural change.

Posted by Mike Apted Monday, January 4, 2016

Power tool: aws-shell

The interactive productivity booster for the AWS CLI.

The AWS CLI can be an incredibly efficient means of interacting with your AWS account, but there is a steep learning curve for beginners and the breadth and depth of functionality can be overwhelming. Enter aws-shell. It’s an interactive shell that provides cool features like: Auto/tab completion of commands and options as you type Examples of the shorthand syntax for various options Fuzzy searching Integration with your account (for autocompleting instance IDs for example) Inline documentation/help Note: If you are like me and don’t read the instructions before getting started and you are running El Capitan take note of the need to install with some extra flags:

Posted by Mike Apted Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Adding category and tag archive pages to Jekyll

Getting it done without plugins.

The next incremental upgrade I wanted to make to this site was the ability to incorporate category and tag based post archive lists and navigation from the right sidebar. There are some plugins available if you Google around, but I wanted to try and implement something simple and using only the stock Jekyll install. To accomplish this I did the following: Categories Create a category layout file “_layouts/category.html” which extends my regular page layout:

Posted by Mike Apted Tuesday, December 15, 2015

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ABOUT ME

Principal Solutions Architect @AWSCloud. Technologist. Founder. Helping startups live their best cloud life. 🐶🏊🏼‍♂️🚴🏽‍♂️🏃🏽‍♂️⛷🏒 Opinions mine.