My littlest sister is currently in 日本 (a.k.a Japan), embarking on her Japanese Studies major work for university. I’m proud of her — and, today is her birthday!

Happy Birthday, you!

✨ 🍰 ✨

To celebrate the occasion (my sister’s birthday), I’d like to share some images that I took while on a trip to Japan, on behalf of Heroku.

Japan will always be near and dear to my heart, for many reasons, but Heroku (which I joined back in 2011), will always be the strongest reason for my affections for the nation / land / territory / people / culture.

const heroku = ('hero' + 'haiku')

One of my proudest professional accomplishments, thus far, helping to inform the design of the following image:

Anyway, here are a carefully curated selection of the images I captured during that short trip. I was using a Leica M240 with a brand new 35mm Summilux (f/1.4) lens. These are arguably some of the best images, image-quality–wise, that I’ve ever taken. Thanks for listening, and enjoy the show! and— Happy birthday, Brittany!

I have made a new friend, recently. His name is Joseph Jablonksi — he prefers to be known as The Walking Mall Poet. The expresses a kind of performance art, writing impromptu poems for people, free of charge, out on the walking mall in Winchester, Virginia, on a classic portable typewriter.

I love it. Here’s a video of him in action:

And, here’s the poem he wrote for me, after speaking with me for approximately five minutes — with absolutely no context, whatsoever into who I am or what I do, other than the fact that I am a programmer:

Machine Lord

by Joseph Jablonski

The little light blinks and blips
My mind sends off to the higher lifts
Of a new reality, a plane of existience
Where wires and sparks fly great distance
As I am a god, hidden from view,
Advising and revising the universe as new

The fingers moving vistas and wisdom
Across the technological dominion,
The silver towers are held by my hands
Flowing scripture that is worshiped
By unknown users behind the curtian
The Great Oz that commands and conquers,

Without my help, the world would suffer
Lags and bugs that crawl and infest,
Thanks to my work, you operate success,
Though my work is achieved near and far,
I am a simple IT Star

Creative Commons License
Share-Alike Attributeion Required Non-Commercial Use

He’s an amazing writer.

I don’t find all the words to be true of course, but — the feelings, it invokes. Fantastic.

Follow Jacob’s journey on Instagram! @walkingmallpoet

• Get out there; capture interesting images in daily life by always carrying a camera.

• Import into MacOS Photos App; edit using MacOS Photos App (surprising, right?).

• Move the images into my To Flickr album.

• Run kennethreitz/apollo Docker image (private), which does the following:

  • Downloads all images from the To Flickr album in iCloud.

  • Randomizes the order of the images.

  • Parses the EXIF metadata for camera and lens information.

  • Sends the image to Google’s Vision API, which sends back information regarding the visual contents of the image, and allows me to have proper tags on Flickr.

  • Uploads the final images to my krstreet Flickr account, with a full title, including the camera used, and the contents of the photo.

These are the latest images, published by myself. My workflow is as follows:

• Get out there; take pictures.

• Import into MacOS Photos App; edit using MacOS Photos App (surprising, right?).

• Move the images into my “To Flickr” album.

• Run “kennethreitz/apollo” docker image, which does the following:

  • Downloads all images from the “To Flickr” album in iCloud.

  • Randomizes the order of the images.

  • Sends the image to Google’s Vision API, which sends back information regarding the visual contents of the image, and allows me to have proper tags on Flickr.

  • Uploads the final images to my krstreet Flickr, with

 Pretty neat, hu? Here are the results — I sincerely hope you enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Latest Images (from krstreet Flickr)