Jesse Anderson’s Blog - Engineering/Science/Tech Blog

Intro to Yogurt: A Pot, A Thermometer, and Some Patience

Basic Instant Pot yogurt, and then the version where you feed the bugs first

Fermentation

Food Science

DIY

Plain yogurt in an Instant Pot or heavy pot, then the advanced version: adding sugars and amino acids before pasteurization to feed the cultures you inoculate.

Atoms of Experience: Tailoring Job Applications With an LLM and a Ground Truth

AI

Tailoring resumes and cover letters with an LLM that can only select from verified atoms of experience, so it can choose what to emphasize but cannot fabricate.

Scraping My Own Job Search: A Nightly Dashboard for Chicagoland Engineering Jobs

Data Engineering

How I built a nightly scraper and dashboard that pulls engineering and data jobs from Chicagoland employer career pages into one sortable, filterable list.

No Cost Private Forums

The Forum Was the Easy Part

Data Engineering

Building an invite-only forum on Cloudflare Workers, Pages, D1, R2, and Access, and the engineering it takes to keep it inside the free tier.

Building an Oak Park Crime Data Science Dashboard

Data Science

Data Engineering

Public Analytics

Building a data science dashboard on top of the Oak Park crime map dataset: year-to-date totals, pulse windows, and date-range comparisons from public police reports.

Building an Oak Park Crime Map from Public PDFs

Data Science

Data Engineering

Public Analytics

How public Oak Park police activity PDFs became a searchable crime map: scraping, PDF parsing, geocoding, and a static Leaflet app backed by DuckDB-WASM.

Build Custom Excel Functions in Rust with xllgen

Rust

Excel

XLL

A tutorial for the xllgen template: write plain Rust functions, tag them with an attribute, and load them into Excel as an XLL without hand-written registration code.

From DLL to XLL: Building an Excel Add-in in Pure Rust

Rust

VBA

Statistics

Build an Excel XLL add-in in pure Rust with no SDK or C compiler: XLOPER12 types, memory ownership, UDF registration, and shipping 27 worksheet functions.

Calling Rust from Excel: Building a Native DLL for VBA

Rust

VBA

Statistics

Build a native Rust DLL that Excel calls through VBA: calling conventions, 32-bit stdcall name decoration, a handle-based FFI, and a VBA wrapper layer.

PMS7003: Or is your air filled with particulate?

ESP32

IoT

Why particulate matter (PM1, PM2.5, PM10) deserves attention, and how to build a PM sensor from a PMS7003 and an ESP32 with easily found components.

SCD41: On Demand CO2 Sensor

ESP32

IoT

The SCD41 CO2 sensor: how it works, its accuracy specs and limitations, and MicroPython code for running it on an ESP32 with an OLED display and alarm buzzer.

ESP32 Project: Sensor Reliability/Power Efficiency

Batteries/BuckBoost/OLEDs

ESP32

IoT

Moving an ESP32 sensor build from breadboard to soldered protoboard, then adding a buck-boost module, AA battery pack, and OLED for about 28 hours of runtime.

Efficient Data Logging with ESP32

A Guide to Using Google Sheets/MongoDB/PostgreSQL/ThingSpeak for IoT

ESP32

IoT

Logging sensor data from a low-cost ESP32-WROOM-32 in MicroPython to Google Sheets, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and ThingSpeak.

Raspberry Pi Sensor Server Project Part 2

Raspberry Pi

IoT

Part 2 of the Raspberry Pi sensor server: a simple Chart.js dashboard that plots the last few hours of sensor data from JSON, after Grafana proved a poor fit.

Raspberry Pi Sensor Server Project

Raspberry Pi

IoT

Wiring a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor to a Raspberry Pi 4, reading it with Python, and logging the readings to a database.

OPTICS in Python

ML

Clustering

OPTICS

OPTICS clustering in Python with scikit-learn, step by step: blob data, reachability and elbow plots, and convex hulls around the resulting clusters.

Generative Adventures: Exploring the Frontiers with VAEs, GANs, and VAE-GANs

ML

Generative AI

A tour of generative models from a UIUC applied machine learning project: variational autoencoders, denoising autoencoders, GANs, and the hybrid VAE-GAN.

Intro to OPTICS

Clustering with OPTICS

ML

Clustering

OPTICS

An introduction to OPTICS clustering: reachability distance, cluster ordering, and why it handles varying densities and odd shapes better than DBSCAN.

DBSCAN Intro

Understanding DBSCAN: Parameters and Adjustments for Spatiotemporal Data Clustering

ML

Clustering

DBSCAN

How DBSCAN clusters by density, what epsilon and MinPts actually control, and how to tune both for spatiotemporal data using a k-distance elbow plot.

Welcome To My Blog

news

An introduction to Jesse Anderson, a chemical engineer turned computer scientist, and what this blog covers: optimization, automation, and data-driven projects.