You’re looking at the personal website for Joseph Atkins-Turkish, a programmer on a long-standing quest to actually keep all of his projects on one website for more than a year. This is my portfolio, but also a space to share my thoughts on life, food, social issues, tech, and anything else.

My programming interests are primarily machine learning, web development, game development, using code to further the Forces of Good, and any/all intersections.

Here are some of my web identitites:

I’m Spacerat on Github:
I’m thespacerat on Twitter (but I rarely tweet anything)
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

Note: the bulk of this post was written in November 2018 shortly after the incident occurred, but the post is dated 2019 because I’m slow at producing blog posts
Sep 27, 2016
Next time you see a racist abuse statistics, here’s how you call them out

If there’s one thing which really grinds my gears, it’s abuse of statistics. Oh, and racism, that isn’t too hot either.
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.