David Rodriguez

New Blog Post: Five demos I tried from the Steam Next Fest. Starfinder: Afterlight was the standout (day-1 buy). #SteamNextFest 💙🎮 #gaming www.strakul.com/blog/posts/s...

Fun times this weekend attending a wedding and seeing online friends IRL for the first time. I've known some of them for years! I'm sure they were surprised to see I am not actually a 3-foot tall lalafell in real life. 🤣

A bit of tourism around South Haven. First time in Michigan to attend a friends wedding. Apparently its a popular spot for them- friends from work have been travelling the past weekends for Michigan weddings. 🤣

New Blog Post: Publishing My DnD LLM Wiki with Quartz Wanted to share my #DnD #TTRPG campaign notes with the party, so I turned my Obsidian wiki into a website with Quartz. Now I just take notes and it updates itself. Blog: www.strakul.com/blog/posts/d... Wiki: www.strakul.com/ttrpg-terra/

Launching #NASARoman was only the beginning! Listen as STScI staff shares what they’re looking forward to as Roman begins its next chapter in space. Credit: D. Kirshenblat (STScI). 🔭

GOAT OR BIRD????

Got my #Mistborn #CosmereRPG books. The metallic dice are super nice!

New Blog Post: A book review for The Fires of December by Brandon Sanderson. A fun Cosmere adventure with a great lead in December, though Hoid's interruptions get to be a bit much. #Books 💙📚 #booksky www.strakul.com/blog/posts/b...

Roman had a bake-out. We had a bake-off. 🎂🚀 While #NASARoman warmed up to help release condensed gases, @stsci.edu staff fired up their ovens to lock in delicious flavors. The results were out of this world! 🔭🧁 #ExpandingOurView #GreatRomanBakeOff

Fun times at the #Maryland #RennFaire this weekend. Always super crowded, but not as hot or muggy as last year.

Take a tour of the sky as stored by the MAST archive and presented by Dr. Meghan Gray. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zs6.... She does an excellent job of showing off an image created by Julie Imig, a scientist at MAST.

New blog post: my #Godot #GameDev journey. Decided to document the past year or so of this new hobby. Still learning how to do things and how to best keep motivated, but it's always good to push out even a relatively simple game out for others to try out. www.strakul.com/blog/posts/g...

Wrapping up my #Godot game: Penguin's Last Stand. A basic survival game as a penguin. Play it online at strakul.itch.io/penguins-las... Grab the source code at: github.com/dr-rodriguez... I can think of a lot of small ways to improve this, but wanted to call it done and move on 😉 #GameDev

We have liftoff for #Roman! Watching from home 😀

Just less than 20 minutes to go #NASARoman 🔭

NASA and SpaceX are targeting #NASARoman’s liftoff for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, August 30, from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 🎥 Launch coverage begins at 6:20 a.m. 🔭

Around Baltimore, staff from the Space Telescope Science Institute are sharing their enthusiasm about the upcoming launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Let us know if you see one of our staff signs out in the wild! #NASARoman 🔭

New Blog Post: A book review for The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson. The start of Mistborn Era 2, set 300 years later, where Allomancy has grown up alongside electricity and more. The Western vibe isn't my thing, but still a lot of fun. #Books 💙📚 #booksky www.strakul.com/blog/posts/b...

Not much progress on my #Godot project, but at least now there's working level ups with selectable power ups, the difficulty ramps up, and a timer counts down to the end (nothing happens at the end... yet). Hardest challenge is finding the time and energy to work on this 🙃 #GameDev

La NASA ha seleccionado hoy como "foto del día" la de Zaragoza con dos eclipses: el del cielo y el reflejado en el río Ebro science.nasa.gov/image-articl...

My favorite photo from today's eclipse. 📷 Andrew McCarthy cosmicbackground.io/pages/ea-sha...

Where were you when the #eclipse hit today? 🌖✨ While millions watched from the ground across Europe, we had a view from space. 🛰️ Did you catch the total or partial eclipse where you are? Let us know in the comments - and check back tomorrow for more imagery and information! 💬

Iterating on a slightly larger #Godot learning project. It's a basic survival game, so nothing too innovative, but I'm making my own art with #Aseprite and learning how to pull things together like random terrain and pooling enemies. Here's a little work-in-progress animation. #GameDev

Overconfident humans who don’t listen to anybody else scare the hell out of me.

New Blog Post: A book review for The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. The final book in the original Mistborn trilogy. Slow start, but a strong, satisfying finish. It also cracks open the wider Cosmere in fascinating ways. #Books 💙📚 #booksky www.strakul.com/blog/posts/b...

Another #GameDev experiment with #Godot. This time I kept the scope very small- a proof-of-concept incremental simulation. This was mainly to explore more of signals and UI, learn draw(), and see how simulation ticks can be handled. strakul.itch.io/mini-increme... github.com/dr-rodriguez...

Smokey air today... Kinda regret coming in to the office now, but I figured it might be better farther south (not that it's a large distance for me). Oh well, at least I'll be most of the day indoors.

As promised, here is a link to try out the (small) game: strakul.itch.io/mini-rpg You can also find the game code on GitHub at github.com/dr-rodriguez... This was fun to make, but got complex quite fast. I should have narrowed the scope or tried something simpler as a refresher. #Godot #GameDev

Pretty much ready to call this little hobby project complete. It was mainly meant for me to remember how to code with #Godot. I have other ideas I want to tackle/learn. Need to put it up on itch.io for others to try it out, but that will need to wait for tomorrow 😉 #GameDev

New Blog Post: A book review for Platform Decay by Martha Wells. Book 8 in the Murderbot Diaries! A classic, fast-paced SecUnit rescue mission set on a massive torus station, with a new emotion module amping up the snark. Familiar and fun. #Books 💙📚 #booksky www.strakul.com/blog/posts/b...

Technicians met the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope at NASA Kennedy’s turn basin wharf and offloaded the trailer carrying the observatory from the barge, where they connected it to a truck that transported Roman to the servicing facility. #NASARoman 🔭

I may be spending a little bit too much time re-learning #Godot with a hobby RPG project, but it's great to see the different elements all coming together. 😄 Here's a preview of a very simple character and inventory menu. #GameDev

New Blog Post on Local AI Model Benchmarks I benchmarked local LLMs on a mid-tier gaming PC. Qwen3.5:9B is still a very strong model, even compared to Gemma4:26B; and a tiny (in size, not parameters) ternary model punched above its weight. #AI #LLM #LocalLLM 🤖💻 www.strakul.com/blog/posts/d...

New Blog Post: A book review for Radiant Star by Ann Leckie. A standalone set in the Imperial Radch universe- heavy on exposition, but the rogue planet setting and religious mysticism make it worth it. #Books 💙📚 #booksky www.strakul.com/blog/posts/b...

“NASA’s next big thing,” astronomers say. #NASARoman will be able to map large sections of space, like some ground-based observatories, with the amazing sharpness of Hubble. Credit: D. Kirshenblat/STScI.

I've migrated my blog! You can find it at strakul.com/blog I've been using Blogger for 14 years, it was time for a change 😉 Go check it out for random thoughts about books, data science, and more. My professional site now also uses the custom domain strakul.com instead of the Github Pages link.

I've migrated my blog! You can find it at strakul.com/blog I've been using Blogger for 14 years, it was time for a change 😉 Go check it out for random thoughts about books, data science, and more. My professional site now also uses the custom domain strakul.com instead of the Github Pages link.

New Blog Post: A book review for Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A worthy addition to the series with sharp social commentary and a standout character in Cato the evolved mantis shrimp🦐⚔️ #Books 💙📚 #booksky strakul.blogspot.com/2026/05/book...

Just a reminder for my fellow sci-fi fans: @aptshadow.bsky.social Children of Time series exists and is OUTSTANDING. The profundity of ideas and hard science in these books is complemented by Adrian’s vibrant prose and skilled story-telling. My all-time favourite series.

Cool looking bird at my feeder today. Never seen this one before- a rose-breasted grosbeak. #birding #Maryland

OPPORTUNITY: The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD, is searching for a Junior Data Engineer to help build, maintain, and support performant and scalable databases for analytics, reporting, and scientific applications using PostgreSQL: https://bit.ly/3P2VOC9

In honor of Hubble’s 36th anniversary 🎉, the telescope looked again at a scene it first captured in 1997: A small portion of a star-forming region about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, known as the Trifid Nebula. (1/7)🧵 🔭

When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research.

STScI's Jenn Kotler painted this stunning piece live at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center during a visit to view #NASARoman. The artwork—which took Kotler five and a half hours to complete—highlights the powerful human stories behind groundbreaking science.