This page showcases a few of my recent undertakings.

Guake Tabs Indicator #

Version: 1

Guake Tabs Indicator is an extension for GNOME Shell 3.8 which displays terminal tabs on the GNOME top panel.

Twin Pints Cooperative #

Status: Fundraising

Twin Pints Cooperative is a start-up intended to operate a brewer incubator and brewpub in Old Town, Lansing, which will engage craft beer drinkers, homebrewers, and artisan brewers through a variety of services and experiences. These include a homebrewing tool library, a cooperatively-owned microbrewery line, and a tap room open to the public.

The novelty of the cooperative model is that we plan to enable 25 local artisan brewers to labor as brewer-partners in the manufacture of our craft beers for a minimal $500 investment – this is vastly lowering the barriers to entry to becoming a brewmaster. Comparatively, you can homebrew for a $200 investment, but there is currently no opportunity to produce artisan beers at a commercial scale short of rolling your own $50K+ brewpub. We want to fill that gap and enable local homebrewers to move up incrementally to the next scale of the hobby.

At this stage, we intend to incorporate with limited-equity shares such that future novice brewers will be able to buy-out the original 25 brewers and succeed them in learning the craft and producing better beers (e.g. a waiting list will keep rotating brewers in and out of the co-op each quarter). In this sense, we are a brewer incubator where new brewing talent can pick up the hobby and prove out their recipes in our tap room in a survival-of-the-fittest manner as they get to select what sale price to sell their own pints for; the co-op would receive only a $2 portion of each sale to cover overhead. Some brewers will prove successful and one day start microbreweries of their own; others will bomb and at least spare themselves the financial loss of alternately opening a brewpub on their own at great expense only to learn they wouldn’t make it.

Another novelty is that this will be a local, community asset with none of the founding team benefiting financially from the success of the co-op, except insofar as we are awarded dividends as brewer-members that produce the beer or CSB-members that imbibe the beer (each earning a % return of earnings each year). (We will certainly offer a lucrative term sheet to our initial seed investors but the plan is to one day operate on a non-equity basis.)

Librewary #

Status: Under development

Librewary is an online equipment lending management system written in the Python django framework.

Originally conceived as the solution for Twin Pints Cooperative’s homebrewing tool library information management needs, I developed the application with a view to making it fully extensible to similar use cases involving lending equipment.

I intend to make the application freely available at a later date, perhaps dually licensed for commercial and free use (AGPL v3).

Midas Backtester #

Status: Frozen

Midas Backtester is a historical stock market backtester written in Python with Zope ZODB, wxPython GUI, and matplotlib.

It can do cool things like screen stocks by fundamental-analysis metrics, simulate a portfolio using the aforementioned stock screens to test profitability, and even algorithmically optimize an idealized portfolio strategy.

Of course, the data sets I work with are limited, my algorithms are flawed, and the features and configurability are lacking – but it is a valid proof-of-concept and is similar to work done every day every second by hedge funds.

I am not currently working on this project, and am happy with the mere working prototype, but the next feature I would like to implement (i.e. expose to the genetic algorithm) is position sizing, as well as some sort of macroeconomic binary on-off switch for having a given portfolio agent invested in stocks or waiting in cash. I also plan to move the data and computing to the cloud using boto to speed things up.

Pretty screenshots and other records of the project can be found at my old website.