Kevin Ludlow is a 45-year-old accomplished software developer, business manager, writer, musician, photographer, world traveler, and serial entrepreneur from Austin, Texas. He is also a former candidate for the Texas House of Representatives.
Please take a moment to view his complete resume for more information.
Note: the entirety of this website was architected and developed from the ground up exclusively by Kevin Ludlow.
I've been meaning to write a post for a couple of weeks now, but I've been especially busy with work!
I've been fortunate enough to be implementing all sorts of new innovations at work and so I've had to balance my development time accordingly. But between the massive code changes to this site (and ultimately the software that runs it), the various publications that I've been working on, the handful of TikTok channels I've started managing, the music work I've been trying to stay on top of, and the numerous travel plans I've been working on (namely to Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Africa), things have been extremely busy!
While the site might not look super different just yet, all of the new development code has been merged into the main code branch and I can absolutely say that the changes are plentiful.
One of the biggest changes to come out of the new release has been the addition of my own Blog management software.
How I Originally Modified Wordpress
When I first wrote this software back in 2005 (at which time the project was called staticMOD), I actually had taken the time to write my own blog management software. Blogs hadn't been around all that long and they wouldn't last much longer with the advent of YouTube mostly taking over the space. So although staticMOD relied upon a custom blog interface, the successor codebase. called openFace, did not. Instead I simply modified the backend of Wordpress and used part of it inside of my administrative toolset.
None of my site was actually running on Wordpress. Rather, there was just a nice text editor built into it and so I customized it so that the entries would be saved into my own personal database with my own personal flair. It's worked extremely well for the past 15 years, but I've been wanting to officially move away from it and so I finally have. My goal has been to have as few 3rd party applications as possible.
The Process of Custom Blog Management
I started making these changes in the summer of 2021, but then had to put the project on hold for a little while. I picked it back up in November and made huge strides - generally getting to work on it most every evening. But with many more personal downturns still ahead, I ultimately had to put the project on hold for a few months - which I did. When I finally came back to all of the coding around March of 2022, it's pretty much been a steady sprint to the finish line. And here we are.
There are definitely still some things that I'm working out, but all in all the site is much easier for me to manage. I now have the ability to easily start integrating all of my social media into my own site. I don't think we've yet reached a time whereby people truly value that, but some day they will.
Additional Tech Highlights
There are two additional tech highlights that I'll mention as they've both been incorporated into my software.
In December of 2021, I put a ton of work into a language processing tool. It was essentially designed to be fed any kind of communication between two people and to analyze every little nuance of said communication. I thought it was a pretty cool tool. While I had fun building the project, it ultimately proved to be a huge waste of my time and effort (the project did take me a ridiculous amount of time to make and like most of my projects was coded entirely from scratch).
But as I'm always one to find the silver lining, I took that software and instead retooled it for openFace. I haven't released it just yet, but it has the ability to analyze decades of information that I have and break that information down into much more meaningful pieces, all of which will have accompanying timelines.
And then in April/May of 2022, I finally was able to build my own facial recognition tool. I've only recently found a good script that will allow me to use this, but my hope is that I'll be able to incorporate this into openFace and ultimately have my entire photo (and later video) library automatically catalogued for me with primitive AI.
More Changes Coming
There are still a host of changes that I haven't rolled out yet. As I had previously written, all of the photos and videos are now in a distributed cloud network. They load very fast and much more importantly, I finally have an infinitely scalable filesystem. I will definitely be releasing these assets more and more in the coming weeks and months.
If you haven't yet had a chance to check this out, please do take a look. I've had this idea for a few years now and decided that I would finally implement it for a TikTok audience.
The project is called "No Small Parts" and this first season is called "The Ladies of Seinfeld". I'm primarily building and releasing the videos to a TikTok audience, but have been duplicating them on YouTube as well (albeit not at all trying to promote the YouTube channel).
The idea is to showcase all of the minor female characters and to try and show people what else they did throughout their respective careers. In the six weeks since launching the first episode, I've since released 14 total episodes. They've gotten a respectable 100,000 views or so. Perhaps in time it will start to pick up, but I just enjoy making them.
I have another show that should be coming out before too long. That one is based more on my love of Dan Carlin's history show as well as the extensive literature I've read of execution over the years. After reading "The Faithful Executioner" a few months ago, it occurred to me that some of this material should be retold and I'd enjoy doing it.
But for now, please enjoy two episodes from "No Small Parts - The Ladies of Seinfeld".
Here's episode 2, "Laura", played by Lynn Clark
Here's episode 6, "Donna" played by Gretchen German.
