We all know the drill by now. Everyone has to get their first blog post written, explaining why they are blogging, why people should read the blogs, and so on and so forth.

Well, I’m not feeling creative enough to stray from that template.  I’m mainly writing this blog for my own purposes.  I like writing, and I want a way to talk about what I’m doing, but in no way do I expect a large readership following.

This probably will be a very technical blog.  I might talk about any projects I am working on, books I’m reading (mostly software), and topics that interest me.

I’d first like to write down some notes on my first Hack-a-thon project.  At least, my first public one.  I’ve participated in 6 Hack-a-thons at ADTRAN, where I work, but just recently participated in Hack Huntsville (the very first one).  It wasn’t a formal Hack-a-thon; it was more of a chance for people to work on cool side projects.

I’ve always wanted to automate our house, but don’t feel like our technology is there just yet.  There are plenty of projects out on GitHub, and in honesty, they are superior to my ideas, but I wanted to see what I can build.

Thus, the birth of HAPP.  You can find my code here: https://github.com/pviafore/HAPP.  As of today, this was what I got done in about 4 hours in Hack-a-thon.  I see Hack-a-thons as a way to learn something new, so I wanted to learn python speech recognition and text to speech.  Couple this with automation, and I had a project.

Now, this code is far from feature complete, it is just hack-a-thon code.  But I plan to flesh it out – more tweaks, config files, better speech recognition.  I hope to document the journey along the way.