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About Jaken Herman
Jaken attended and graduated from Sam Houston State University with a B.S. in Computer Science with a focus in Software Engineering. Out of university, Jaken landed a software engineering job at Athena Engineering Services, then moved on to a position at NASA's Johnson Space Center working as a software engineer for KBR Government Solutions.
While not having professional game development experience, Jaken does have academic as well as hobbyist experience in the game development space. Jaken is an avid believer in improving your technical tool belt by continuing to learn and experiment with new technologies and processes.
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Blog postOn Baseball Savant (https://baseballsavant.mlb.com), they have these great visualizations for displaying percentile rankings. Basically, out of the population of MLB athletes, where does a player stand in comparison for a given statistic? In the photograph below, I’ve snipped a few stats (Exit Velocity, xBA, K%, and Sprint Speed). We’re going to replicate this visualization using d3 today. (For the record, this is Daniel Vogelbach (MIL) vs. 2020 season data)
First, I’ll assume you hav1 month ago Read more -
Blog postThe “Slash Line” is a term that is often used in discussion about the offensive value of a player, and is sometimes displayed on broadcasts when a player is coming up to bat, but what is it? The slash line is a collection of three statistics:
A player’s batting average (AVG) A player’s on-base percentage (OBP) A player’s slugging percentage (SLG) The combination of these three player statistics combined with a forward slash is where the name “slash line” comes from. Sometimes, the sla1 month ago Read more -
Blog postR for Data Science: Chapter 1 R for Data Science: Chapter 1 These are my solutions to the Exercises in Chapter 1 of R for Data Science.
First, I need to import the tidyverse:
library('tidyverse') ## -- Attaching packages ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- tidyverse 1.3.0 -- ## v ggplot2 3.3.2 v purrr 0.3.4 ## v tibble 3.0.3 v dplyr 1.0.2 ## v tidyr 1.1.2 v stri1 month ago Read more -
Blog postThis post assumes you’ve set up VirtualBox & Vagrant. If you have not completed this step, follow the steps outlined in my previous blog post: https://www.jakenherman.com/articles/2020-08/virtualbox-vagrant-setup.
The first thing we’re going to do is open up our terminal and run cd baseball, which is the directory we created in the previous post.
After than, we need to get the .tar.gz that contains the Chadwick software installer and configuration files. To download t1 month ago Read more -
Blog postSetting up VirtualBox and Vagrant is not only a breeze, but it’s also free. This combo is great for simple projects, much like the project we’re working on in this series (should you choose to finish this full series) - parsing Retrosheet baseball data using Chadwick in order to create useful R data frames for visualization.
Keep in mind throughout this post that your download+setup process may vary slightly, but the main process will remain similar enough to follow.
Step 1: Downl1 month ago Read more -
Blog postWith no baseball being played so far in 2020, there hasn’t been anything incredibly interesting to analyze or look at besides historical data (in the MLB at least). On June 10th and June 11th, however, we finally got our first bit of new MLB information to play around with - the draft. I’ve taken data from Rounds 1-5 and compiled them into some (hopefully) interesting visuals.
Picks by State Let’s start with a simple question. What state produced the most sought after baseball talent1 month ago Read more -
Blog postPer the sub-title, this is “Part 2”. If you didn’t read Part 1, I would suggest going back and reading that now. Now that we have a create-react-app that automatically deploys to a Heroku Dyno when we push a change to our GitHub repository, it’s time to make the app actually do something. Before starting, though, we are going to need to add a few public npm packages, like AG Grid, Semantic UI, and Axios. AG Grid is going to help us display our data retrieved from the API in a nice table forma1 month ago Read more
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Blog postUsing React through create-react-app is great, but when we consider that it will create a single-page application, we begin to realize that changing properties in the document head of our html file is seemingly not so easy to do - but that could not be further from the truth.
react-helmet is a reusable React component created by the NFL that can manage all of your changes to the document head, and it could not be any simpler to use. It supports server-side rendering, and while this bl1 month ago Read more -
Blog postPer the sub-title, this is “Part 1”. In this series, we’re going to build out a community market listing react application for MLB The Show 19 and set up an automatic pipeline to build and deploy our React application from a GitHub repository to a Heroku Dyno. In this post we will scaffold out the react app and get the automatic deployment set up for Heroku, which will prepare ourselves to create the components necessary to list out all listings for MLB The Show 19’s Community Market. Why MLB1 month ago Read more
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Blog postDailyUI challenge 002 - Design a credit card checkout form or page. Did this one without a wire-framing tool - instead opted to just use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I only worked on it for about an hour, so I’m not too upset with the results. The card type icon (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, etc. does change depending on the start of the card number).
Things I could improve on:
The fonts are pretty ugly, I’d like to spend more time browsing available fonts. Responsiveness. Because this w1 month ago Read more
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Create stunning 3D games in a short amount of time using Amazon Lumberyard, a free and exciting game development platform. This book is a ground-up, out-of-the-box tutorial on 3D game development and programming with Lua and Amazon Lumberyard with little or no game development experience required.
Beginning Game Development with Amazon Lumberyard walks you through the user interface of the Amazon Lumberyard engine; teaches you how to develop detailed terrain using heightmaps, megatextures, weather, and vegetation; and takes you through exporting the game for distribution. The book will show you how to create a player as well as enemies while not getting bogged down with third-party tools for animation or model creation. You will also work with simple physics, colliders, meshes, weather generation, Lua scripting, user interface development, and much more.
By the end of the book, you will be able to create many different types of video games using the Amazon Lumberyard engine and even have a completed project ready to release or put in your portfolio.
What You Will Learn
- Discover the mechanics and terminology of game development
- Familiarize yourself with the Amazon Lumberyard game engine in detail
- Modify game scripts using the Lua language
- Discover how to optimally structure game layers
Who This Book is For
Developers, programmers, and would-be game designers who have long wanted to dip their toes into the world of game development but have found other game engines and platforms to have too high a barrier to entry.