You’re looking at the personal website for Joseph Atkins-Turkish - software and data engineer, amateur musician and even-more-amateur home cook.

This website is my portfolio - check out my projects! But it’s also a space to share my thoughts on life, food, social issues, tech, and anything else.

My programming and professional interests are varied: web and product development, machine learning, game development, decision science, generally using code to further the Forces of Good, and any/all intersections of the above.

Here are some of my web identitites:

I’m Spacerat on Github:
Here’s my Linkedin.
I’m also on Soundcloud and Steam.

Here's some stuff I wrote:

May 14, 2020
The value of information

How much should you pay for information to help you make a decision?
Apr 27, 2020
Estimation of normal distribution parameters from percentiles, in Python

Let’s say you’re going to do some business modeling for a friend who’s thinking of opening a flower shop, producing something like this at the end. If you ask your friend the following question…
Jul 28, 2019
Simple Custom Resources for the AWS CDK

If you are using the AWS CDK you will quickly discover that because it’s just a wrapper around CloudFormation, it shares with it the issue that not all of AWS’s features have been implemented.
Jul 6, 2019
Debugging HTTPS configuration for Dokku

I recently decided to set up my website to use HTTPS. Configuring Github Pages - which hosts this blog - was easy . I just had to follow the Github Pages documentation on troubleshooting custom domains which directed me to update the A records in veryjoe.com’s domain configuration, then check a checkbox.
May 26, 2019
I used the formula for the volume of a cylinder in real life for the first time ever and it went OK

For me, the phrase “pie dee over two squared aitch” (𝜋 (d½)² h) - also known as “pie are squared aitch” (𝜋r²h) - evokes images of university lectures; magnetic cylindrical rods, electric charge in a piece of wire. If you need to understand those things, you need to know how much space they take up in the world. Until the situation described here, I don’t think I’ve ever actually needed to calculate the volume of a cylinder outside of an exam.
Sep 27, 2016
Hello Jekyll

DigitalOcean’s lovely WordPress instance decided it would constantly throw me Database Errors which I couldn’t be bothered to fix because, in the end, why do I need a database at all?
Aug 19, 2015
California: impressions, words, photos, food

People keep asking: what’s California like? Everyone has funny accents and rain doesn’t exist.
Dec 8, 2014
Hummus Pasta Salad

I made this recently by searching for “hummus pasta salad” on google, taking inspiration for a recipe or two and then improvising with what I had.
Dec 4, 2014
I hosted CollabPaint! And got annoyed at 4-years-ago-Joe.

I put my old collaborative whiteboard project CollabPaint back up on the internet! Multiple people can log in to a room and paint at the same time, without having to register for an account or sign up.
Feb 8, 2014
Setting up shop

I decided to bite the bullet and get myself an actual server on the internets to host my thingamabobs, and here I write about my experience.
Feb 7, 2014
Removing dead files from iTunes

So, I made a blog. Mainly so I have a place to put my things.