Tom Arra's Picture

Hey, I’m Tom! Product Leader & Engineer.

I'm a product leader & engineer who loves to work with global teams and products. I help organize the corporate chaos to make the best solutions for customers. Here I post about not just tech but a few hobbies as well.

Joining Shorebird

New Year, New Job. Time to hit the ground running again. The main post for this is on the Shorebird Blog and LinkedIn but wanted to capture it here as well for historical purposes.

πŸ”— DeepSeek used OpenAI to train

Just love to see this

β€œThe situation is rich with irony. After all, it was OpenAI that made huge leaps with its GPT model by sucking down the entirety of the written web without consent.”

Well, well, well. How the turntables

New Website Design

Time for a fresh coat of paint and some updates across the board.

πŸ”— Apple wrote checks Camera Control can't cash

Just nails exactly what I have been thinking with my iPhone 16 Pro. The button is essentially just a shortcut button. I’ve reverted back to the shutter on the touchscreen given the goofy interactions with the swiping.

Moving on from VGV

Disappointed to be leaving but looking forward to a new challenge which I'm still searching for.

New Project - Curling Scoreboard

I just can't seem to help myself πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ Another little side project to help out the curling club and our electronic scoreboards.

Leaving BMW

It's been six years since I had to write a post like this. Truthfully, at least for me, it's never easy. Unfortunately BMW has made the decision to shut down the Chicago Technology Office. I'm not going to beat around the bush here, this really sucks.

Bike Share Buddy 1.6.2 Update

While normally a x.x.2 release may not be worthy of a post I feel like this one is as it definitely took some work on my end. I had a goal to start to remove complexity from my code base and this was my first stab at it.

2019 USCA Arena Nationals Recap

For the week of May 5th 2019 I got to be a full time professional athlete.

Curling, a Season in Review

I was able to get to the club championship game! It's a great primer for heading to Arena Nationals.