Being a Two-Way Baseball Fan

⚾️ (code)

I've talked about it a few times and occasionally post on bluesky about how brutal the job hunt has been for me. I left my last job in July of last year before venturing off on my own to consult/freelance and work on some stuff I'm passionate about. Recently a mutual said it would be a good idea for me to have a product out that users could play around with to see my skills in action. The main one I'd point to is probably Volkara, but I'd like to start translating some old ideas and continuing to migrate abandoned concepts into something deployed and usable.

So the first thing I decided to reboot was one of two teaching/data analysis focused REST API projects, namely a baseball stats API that wraps the MLB Stats API, Lahman, and Retrosheet, inspired by one of my favorite programming books, Analyzing Baseball Data with R. I've been grinding away at it for the past couple of days and have a lot of the Lahman data exposed through endpoints, with a charm cli for DIY API testing (and for a simple ETL pipeline).

On Thursday, I worked on cleaning up the messy retrosheet loading implementation I made for a lot of the day, and then added a few proxied MLB stats api endpoints. Thanks in huge part to the pypi package. That library author has this nice endpoint configuration file that was pretty easy to sift through and a good wiki. It's a little lame to take a picture of docs but I still find swagger docs to be so cool!

Since starting this log, I've mostly (‼) knocked out the entire roadmap I had laid out for myself. What remains is expanding the ETL pipeline to cover all the entire breadth of retrosheet's game logs & play by plays. I've done quite a bit of work I'm pretty proud of on this.

The project is sort of materializing (in my head) to be a Nominatim for baseball data. I plan to deploy it today and want to make the containerized application something a user could host on their own metal.

I think I'll draft a longer document about some of the cooler stuff in the API.

The Title

I'm generally not a "stats-nerd" baseball fan (not meant to be derogatory, I literally refer to my computers as Pokemon - sent from Roaring Moon) but when I discovered the R book and occasionally when I read the yearly baseball prospectus I shift gears. I like the burst of athleticism and mind games of Baseball. Not unlike a battle shonen.

The title is a silly way for me to talk about how I can be both sometimes.

NixOS (code)

It's the weekend so I feel a teeny bit more comfortable making some more sweeping changes to my nix configuration, namely moving my mini to nix-darwin.

Thanks for reading! Happy to hear any thoughts you have either here or on bluesky!