Red Rocks

Site Redesign and Migration

March 5, 2026

My old site design was getting a bit old and it was time for a cleanup. Now that AI is all the rage I used Claude Code to come up with a new site design and applied it.

This is really 2 different sites… www.ericdaugherty.com and blog.ericdaugherty.com. www was hosted via GitHub Pages while blog was hosted using Google’s Blogger. I felt it was time to move to a simpler static blog setup, so I migrated that to Hugo, also hosted by GitHub Pages.

Portable Power Pricing (or how I built something with AI)

February 21, 2026

In my recent blog post Surviving the Great PSPS of 2025, I outlined my interest in Portable Solar Generators, and I've been looking for a side project to test out the latest AI capabilities. I found the answer in PortablePowerPricing.com

I was recently looking to buy an additional battery for my EcoFlow Delta 2 Max, but since all of these products are nearly always sold at a significant discount to their MSRP, I wasn't really sure how good of a deal it was. There are existing price trackers, but I realized there was another interesting aspect here. I wasn't just looking for the best price, but for the best price per Watt hour (Wh). I realized there was an opportunity to build a price comparison site specifically for this product category.

JVC Projector HDMI CEC Control

January 3, 2026

I recently upgraded my projector to a 4k JVC model along with an upgraded AV Receiver (Denon). I previously used an old Harmony remote to control the whole system, but with the new components and the realization that I really only use the Apple TV as an input device, I wanted to simplify the remote setup.

The Apple TV and the Denon worked well together using HDMI CEC. This allows the Apple TV to turn the Denon AV Receiver on and off as needed, as well as to send volume up/down and mute signals over the HDMI cable.

Surviving the Great PSPS of 2025

December 20, 2025

Colorado is having a dry winter, and over the past few days we've had very high winds along the Front Range area, where I live. These conditions create a high risk for wildfires, as evidenced by the Marshal Fire in 2021. Xcel instituted a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) event twice in 3 days to reduce this risk.

The first event started about 10a on Wednesday and lasted until Noon on Thursday (14 hours). The second event started at 6a on Friday and lasted into Saturday (over 24 hours). 

Go Web Server using Lambda Function URLs

May 21, 2022

It has been possible to use Lambda Functions to host Go (Golang) Web Servers for years. I wrote about a project doing this back in 2016. More recently, the github.com/apex/gateway project provided a drop in replacement for net/http’s ListenAndServe function that supported AWS REST APIs, and later the AWS HTTP APIs.

Amazon recently released the ability to access a Lambda Function directly via URL, without needing to configure the REST APIs or HTTP APIs. This remove an extra layer of configuration, complexity, and potentially cost, for deployments.

Package Delivery Detector

February 8, 2019

The following is an outline of how and why I built a tool to detect when packages are delivered to my front porch. If you have enough of the right infrastructure in place, this will serve as a guide to get it setup yourself. All the source code is available, so if your setup is different, you can take and modify what I’ve done to work for you.

This solution is built using Go, AWS, Google Vision, and Docker.

Simple HipChat AddOn in Go

March 17, 2017

We use HipChat at work to stay connected. It works well and has some fun plugins, including Karma. I’ll bet a few of you can guess what happens when you create a karma system in a company full of smart technical folks.

THEY GAME THE SYSTEM.

One of the more interesting hacks they discovered is to use the ‘find and replace’ functionality built into HipChat to secretly give (or more likely take) karma to/from another person. The proper usage of the Find/Replace functionality is something like:

How and Why I Became a 'Manager'

March 16, 2017

After my previous post about my approach to technical interviewing, I received some requests to write more about my career path. In this post, I’m will attempt to answer a question I get asked somewhat regularly: Why did I stop writing code and become a manager?

How did I choose Software?

Before we can dive into why I became a manager, we need to explore a bit more about who I was. Growing up, I loved Legos. I would spent hours building custom lego creations. As I got older, my family got a Commodore 64 and I spent hours playing cartridge games, watching Zaxxon fail to load from cassette tape, and typing in programs printed in computer magazines.

While I was in High School, I ran a dial-up BBS on a computer made from parts cobbled together from old computers and occasional purchases from Computer Shopper. I took all three classes in our computer lab at the High School: Typing, BASIC Programming, and Computer Drafting. Typing was the most important of those three. When I exhausted every class at the High School, I took a Turbo Pascal class at the local community college. If I wasn't already convinced (I was), after that I knew I wanted to write software for a living.

Technical Interviewing and Hiring

March 5, 2017


There has been some discussion in the technical community recently about the use of algorithms and coding tests during the interview process.  Here is a sample:

I have my own thoughts I would like to share, but this isn't really a topic for 140 characters.

Why should you care what I think?

I've spent a lot of time interviewing and hiring developers across several organizations. For a while I was doing interviews every day. In fact, I remember telling my recruiter that he couldn't schedule more than 2 interviews in a day because by the third interview I found I was no longer effective. I estimate that I've interviewed over 300 candidates, and been the primary decision maker on over half of those.  I have been a key member of the interviewing and/or hiring team in two custom software services companies that have grown from 30 or fewer people to over 115 during my tenure.  I've done this a lot, and I was there to see my successes and my failures.

GoLang Alexa SDK

March 4, 2017

I continue to be interested in Alexa, Amazon AWS Lambda, and Go (golang), and I’ve found a new way to deploy Alexa apps in Go on Lambda.

While Go is still not an officially supported language on Amazon Lambda, there are several ways to make it work:

In my previous project where I built a screen scraper in Go and deployed it to Lambda, I utilized Lambda_proc.  This does work pretty well an is a solid solution.

I found GopherJS to be an interesting project, but a pretty indirect way to get Go onto Lambda.  Lambda can run Go Linux binaries, so converting your Go to JavaScript seems like the wrong approach.

The eawsy team released their new tool earlier this year and it seems to be the cleanest approach.  The overhead between the Python shim and your Go code is clean and fast.  They utilize a Docker container to build the necessary bridges from Python to Go, resulting in very fast execution.  You can write log messages to the Lambda console using log.Printf. And it is FAST. The HelloWorld skill runs in sub-millisecond times!