A sonic soul with a relentless drive to make ideas real on JmsDnns

Counterfit

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Counterfit were an emo punk band from San Diego, CA. The band moved to California in 1999 and disbanded in 2005.

I started Counterfit with a friend, Marc Allen, back in high school, in Connecticut. The band started as a skate punk band around 1997 and became increasingly emo leading up to when we moved to California in the fall of 1999. The band that arrives in California was so different from what we did in high school, that we decided to just say that band started then.

First Aid Kit

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

First Aid Kit was an post-rock band from Rockville, Connecticut, formed in 2001 and disbanded in 2004.

We released a full length, Frights And Shivers, an EP, Forgot ID, and two more songs after we broke up. Over the band’s lifespan we toured the east of the US extensively and Canada.

This band had strong opinions and it was in your face about them. We didn’t set out to write music that was easy to listen to. We wanted to write music that challenged the listener’s sense of melody and time, and we wanted to deliver that with lyrics urging us to think harder about the decisions we make in life.

Shipyards

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Shipyards was a short lived indie rock band from Brooklyn, NY.

I started Shipyards in 2007 with JP Chirdon and Brian Pile, who I played with in First Aid Kit. We started jamming and writing and eventually formed a whole band with some old friends. It split in 2009 when one of the band members moved to Norway.

For me, this band feels like one that had so much potential, but never had a real chance to flourish.

Medio

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Medio was a rock band from New York City.

It was 2007 and I was working at Bear Stearns (RIP) and learned there was a Wall St Battle of the Bands. I went and found the bands were terrible, and I wanted to make a band and play the next year. I found someone with a Sepultura tattoo, convinced him to jam, and off we went.

The members of this band were always career driven. We’d play whenever our busy schedules allowed, which was never often enough, and we wrote heavy, dirty songs about life. This band loved to shred and our singer loved to flow, so the music we wrote was was somewhere between Mars Volta, Deftones, and Tool.

Sea Graves

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sea Graves was a post-hardcore band from Brooklyn, NY.

Jameson and I had been friends for a long time. He’d play in First Aid Kit on tours when members couldn’t go. We also played in Shipyards together. While playing in Shipyards, we started to feel like we had turned the amps down too much and our songs had become too slow. We wanted to do something loud and fast again, but we also wanted to reinvent ourselves.

Adventure Capitalists

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Adventure Capitalists were a startup themed punk band from Brooklyn, NY.

I met Rob Spectre through the NYC tech community. He presented at a meetup I organized, hack&&tell, and his laptop was covered in stickers for punk rock bands and I thought, “well… I need to be friends with that guy.”

We didn’t expect to start a band. We were both busy working with startups, but we figured out we both play music and we started jamming. We played covers of 90’s punk bands for a while, and then the Snowden disclosures happened… While discussing it, we started having ideas for funny songs we could write about it and ways to use startup tech as part of the gag.

Wattershed, by Foo Fighters

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The best Foo Fighters song! They’ve got lots of good ones, but this one is THE BEST ONE.

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AI For History Teachers

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AI has been a whole thing for several years now and it’s been hyped beyond belief. One of the ways we notice how excessive the hype has been is how many people are sure AI is going to change everything, yet they can’t quite describe how anyone should use it. They’re just convinced it’s the future and that we’re all going to lose our jobs.

Between working for UPenn and being part of the History Matters community with Dr Joanne Freeman (shown above) and Annie Evans, I have heard a many teachers discuss AI. They’ve been scared. They’ve been confused. Even the AI professors at UPenn have had existential panics. Above all, when teachers finally get around to using it, they quickly experience AI’s notorious hallucinations, causing them to think the stuff doesn’t even work.

Panasonic Youth, by Dillinger Escape Plan

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

what a beast of a song… cripes. i spent a month watching ben eller videos to get the skills to play this mf. i’ve played guitar for 30 years but practicing this song gave me blisters in new places on my fingers and now they’re calloused like steel

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Kids, by Descendents

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

KIDS ON COFFEE KIDS ON COFFEE KIDS ON COFFEE

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New Boobs, by NOFX

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Another shredder from NOFX! The song was written in the 80’s to mock the superficial people in LA who believed the only way to get ahead in life was to have a boob job. It’s also a rager on guitar.

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Your Destructive Self, by Overcast

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I love this band so much. They were my introduction to New England’s metalcore scene and I couldn’t get enough. Saw them live whenever I could and I learned how to play as much of their as I could figure out. Here’s to yall, Overcast! Legends!

Original#

The Wild Man of the Revolution, Samuel Adams

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I had been curious about Samuel Adams’ story for a while, but his story is so rarely told in any detail that I also didn’t know why I should care about him. What little I knew, I knew from the history of John Adams, the second US President, and Samuel’s cousin. Each bio I read of John Adams mentioned a detail about his trip to France, during the Revolution, that suggests something huge about Samuel before moving on without explanation. The story usually goes, while John was in France, he kept getting annoyed by people he met who always asked about his much more famous cousin, Samuel. In the context of a book about John, I found it’s surprisingly easy to read that, wonder why Samuel was more famous, and then go back to reading about John as my curiosity fades from memory.

DNB From Scratch

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have listened to drum n bass for a long time. For me, it always felt like the punk rock side of EDM. I learned of it during the 90’s when it was still rudimentary but still had a distinct direction. I had never seen engineering done the way dnb producers did it back then. Inventing new subgenres and seeing how far they can be stretched out creatively is a lot of work. I bet it didn’t feel like work, tho. I bet it was an amazing time.

Learning With Covers

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have been teaching myself how to record music for several years. To get started, I figured I should do a bunch of cover songs where I play drums, bass, the guitars, and sing to quickly create a bunch of data for me to learn with. Once I got the hang of it, I would switch to recording my own music. This is what I did to learn how to record so I could then record the music I wrote for American Food.

Algorithmic Underground

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have been thinking about something Jean Baudrillard said a lot recently. It comes to mind because of the current moment and what is happening around generative AI.

Prior to the current moment, I believed he was more cynical than necessary. The current moment changed that for me because I found myself wondering if we might actually bring about some of the futures Baudrillard talked about. In particular, a future where art dies.

The Founders On Virtue

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

People paying attention to politics in the US have probably come across the term virtue signaling. It is typically used to mock anyone that expect others to live for a cause higher than self-interest. Folks have claimed it is virtue signaling, instead of virtuous, to resist racism, homophobia, sexism, or to support noble causes like helping the poor. Instead of adjusting to be more virtuous, these folks want to resist letting anyone call them out for bad behavior. Often enough, the folks resisting virtue see themselves as patriotic too, without realizing they are at odds with the nation’s founding principles.

Cartons

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve learned to use many programming languages over the years. Most of them could reasonably described as ordinary, but every now and then I come across something unlike anything else I’ve seen before. After all these years programming, it’s also just been a long time since I felt a language offered a genuinely new idea to the world. And yet, Rust actually is like no other language I’ve seen before and with some genuinely new ideas too.

Hell Hath No Fury, by Open City

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a huge fan of every band Dan Yemin has had. I really love the guitar playing in one of his current bands, Open City. The opening riff in this song is a masterpiece as punk rock anger.

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Penn AI Conf

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I attended University of Pennylvania’s first AI conference last Friday, where I heard several talks and hung out with an old friend that teaches there. I went to the conference with an open mind, but I must confess that I’ve been cynical about AI after feeling blasted by AI tech bros and doomers. I am grateful to have learned from the perspective of more level-headed folks and I even changed some of my opinions about where it’s all going.

The Death Of John Smith, by NOFX

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This band wrote some of the most amazing shredders of all time. This song in Par. Tic. U. Lar. Gonna make the meedley meedleys go weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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Anti Manifesto, by Propagandhi

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Been playing this one on guitar since I heard it on Fat Music for Fat People, way back in ‘96. Saying I adore this band doesn’t do it justice. They’re brilliant for so many reasons.

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Shadows Follow, by Metallica

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorites from the last Metallica record 🤘

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Totally Fine, by Pup

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Power chords and lots of energy. I decided to try moving around more in front of the camera for this one, to see if it better expresses what I’m like on stage. It feels awkward, but I have a sense I need to do more of that.

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Coolidge, by Descendents

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My first punk song! Counterfit covered this one when we first moved to California and played it live a few times. I learned about it them when they were on the soundtrack for a Thrasher skate video. They are considered the first pop-punk band and influenced all the punk that came after them, especially in the 90’s.

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Master Of Puppets, by Metallica

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m dressed as George Washington for this one. I’ve played this song on guitar since I was 12, and I still love playing it on guitar. This song is so long and requires serious endurance for all the downpicking.

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Baby's First Coffin, by Dillinger Escape Plan

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This band is probably the most chaotic band I’ve ever seen or heard. The musicianship required to play their stuff is surreal. I play one of their easier songs in this video.

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Dis'chords, by Lagwagon

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have spent a lot of time studying this band. They were one of my favorites in high school. This record in particular, because it’s basically Metallica but in major scales, which was a perfect fit for who I was back then. Hyper and generally happy, unlike the anger found in metal.

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Shower Days, by NOFX

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I adore this absurd song. The guitars are a punk rock shred fest and the lyrics are about not wanting to take a shower more than twice a week. 15 year old me fell in love with this song the first time I heard it and I’ve adored it ever since.

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Dousing This Flame, by Overcast

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Overcast were hometown heroes for the New England metal scene in the 90’s. I was at their last show at the Tune Inn in New Haven, way back when, and was thrilled when TWO amazing bands emerged from Overcast’s ashes: Shadow’s Fall and Killswitch Engage. This is one of my favorite Overcast songs and I dressed like George Washington for the guitar cover.

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Power Mustache, by The Vandals

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This was the first guitar covers video I made. This song is so hyper and ridiculous. The lyrics are about how we can never trust anyone who seeks power and has a mustache. It’s one of the first songs where I heard Josh Freese on drums too. I can play it on drums and guitar and do so regularly.

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A Guide To Making Good Demos

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Sharing music can be a complicated task for folks who play guitars. We can easily use something like voice memos to capture us playing a guitar, but the song we have in our heads is usually big enough to include drums, a bass, and maybe a second or third guitar. Learning to play instruments and how to write music were already huge undertakings, so it always makes sense to me when musicians don’t also know how to produce music.

Eyes

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Rust appears to be taking over a mindshare that has long been considered unaccessible to anything other than C++. The language makes some fascinating security guarantees at a time when it seems like the C++ community is tired of struggling with using the language to build secure systems, and when younger generations are choosing not to take on that pain. Stuff built with Rust can often be faster than C++ too. From what I can tell, there is a perception that just choosing to use Rust makes software both more secure and faster.

Finished Tracking 3 EPs

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am very pleased to say I have completed tracking for the first releases by American Food! It has taken a lot of time and effort to get through everything, especially if you consider the time I spent learning how to do things I hadn’t done before.

I feel very lucky to have friends who are both excellent at music in some way and willing to give me helpful feedback. I need to thank my old friend, Marc Allen, for helping me improve as a drummer, for giving me a good foundation of knowledge about how to record music, and for being the second drummer in one of the songs. I need to thank Michael Schorr for helping me pick which drums to buy and for helping me learn how to tune them well. I need to thank Dave Palaitis for all the feedback and tips he gave me as he heard each mix, explaining how to fix issues I didn’t know I had. And, I need to thank everyone on the Snowsuit Discord for the endless discussion about everything music.

Decorators 101

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It is underappreciated that Python decorators are syntactic sugar for function wrappers. People new to Python usually encounter them first by writing like @foo above a function bar and observing that bar behaves differently than it used to.

More tangibly, using the @foo decorator on bar looks like this.

@foo
def bar():
 print("hello!")

To understand decorators is to understand function wrappers, but understanding those requires being comfortable with first class objects, so we’ll start there. We will then explain function wrappers, using an example time_it that determines how long it takes for a function to complete. We then use decorator syntax to apply our wrapper in a clean, elegant way.

MultiVenv

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I replaced virtualenvwrapper with 100 lines of bash, simplifying the core experience into something you can drop on any box without installing anything.

A VirtualEnv Wrapper#

I was a fan of virtualenvwrapper (VEW) for years. I attribute having an unusually smooth experience with Python to always using VEW for development. VEW made it easy to have virtualenvs (venvs) that were unobtrusive.

My favorite aspect of the project is that it would store every venv together in a common directory, making it easy to manage or search them separately from a project. That may seem like a small detail, but I loved the freedom I got to ensure text searches in the project wouldn’t include whatever it found in the venvs. Keeping env directories outside my project directory meant that, by default, I didn’t have to use any cli flags to ignore a directory, or configure VSCode to ignore some directory, etc.

July 4th is NOT the US's Birthday

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The country’s real birthday is December 1st, 1774. Before the shot heard around the world. Before July 4th, 1776.

Ben Franklin had the idea for a union of states decades before the United States existed. He first proposed it in 1754, and he plays an audacious role in ensuring it came into existence that only he could play.

Franklin’s story is one of bending the rules and stretching the truth to somehow improve society. He starts at a young age and it becomes a decisive trait that ensures an end to the Revolutionary War as much as George Washington, though GW worked much harder.

The Penny Royalties

Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I played drums in a Nirvana cover band for Halloween back in October 29th, 2016. We wanted to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. After years of being a huge fan, I was thrilled to finally perform some of Dave Grohl’s drumming.

We called ourselves The Penny Royalties and we played all of Nevermind, front to back.

Breed, as performed by The Penny Royalties#

Rodeo Clown, by Lifetime

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Scott Golley. What an animal he is on the drums. He has that rare ability to play insanely fast with a solid groove that the whole band’s rhythm just locks into. He’s one of my biggest influences and this is one of my favorite Lifetime songs.

Original Song#

Getting meta with Python

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Metaprogramming is powerful way to have a huge impact with a small amount of code.

This post will explain metaprogramming by building a simple data validation system, similar to Schematics or Pydantic. We will start with a basic Python class and build upwards, solving one problem after another, until we have a data validation framework.

Hold on to your butts cuz it’s about to get nneeerrrddyyyy!

Preview#

We want to make someting like the following code work.

american f00d

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

american f00d is a musical experiement.

This project began as a way to use music as a vehicle for social commentary. What’s being said in the lyrics guides how the music should sound & feel. I found it interesting how that changed the role of musical genre from a band identity to a stylistic choice.

This band, which is just me and a laptop, writes music in any genre featuring guitars & drums. However, to keep things organized, music will be released in the form of three song EPs, each with a distinct personality that drives both what’s being said and what genre of music is best for saying it. The band itself won’t have a genre, but every EP will.

How I Started Reading History

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Lincoln#

This story begins in 2012, when Lincoln was in the theaters. I went on my own one afternoon and came out of the theater bewildered by what I just saw. I knew I saw a story about Lincoln that had all kinds of intense moments, but that was about as far as I got. Any notion I may have had of understanding US history was gone by the time I walked out of the theater.

Tire Me, by Rage Against The Machine

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is my favorite Rage song. It is punk af while retaining Rage’s mighty fingerprint. I love it so much.

Original Song#

The Casket of Roderick Usher, by Finch

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite Finch songs on a criminally underrated album. This video is also the first time I have covered drumming done by a friend. The drummer on this album is the same Marc Allen I started three bands with in high school. He is a BEAST on this record, especially this song.

Original Song#

Everlong, by Foo Fighters

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What could I say about Dave Grohl’s drumming that hasn’t already been said? This is a bird’s-eye view of me playing drums to a legendary Foo Fighters song.

Original Song#

False Alarm, by The Bronx

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Jorma Vik is one of the most tasteful punk drummers out there. His drum tones are incredible and his grooves align so well with the bands he plays for that you almost forget how complicated his patterns actually are.

Original Song#

Go, by Pearl Jam

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This song has some of my favorite drumming of all time. I am not a big fan of Pearl Jam, but I have been playing the drums to this particular song for years.

Original Song#

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hello!#

I’m James Dennis. I make ideas real, whether through code, music, or writing.

I have built data pipelines & backends for Spotify, a payments gateway and deployment tooling for Venmo, and ML pipelines that processed hundreds of terabytes of video for HBOMax. I developed a mobile player for VHX (acquired by Vimeo) and an event admission system for The Whitney Museum’s biennial. While doing DARPA funded mental health research with Qntfy, I designed and built out a system that collected data from every major social network and fitness tracker.

RSS Feeds

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000