/ Recent content on A data and technology blog Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 07 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /research/ Sun, 07 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /research/ Research Question What are local government agencies and departments doing to enable the public to use open data for making decisions? Is it working? Research Problem(s) While making open data available is a great first step for agencies, it doesn’t mean that they have made it accessible and usable for everyone. I think that there is a gap in how local governments provide data to the public so they can analyze it and make informed decisions. /data/ Sun, 14 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /data/ Seattle Police Stops by Officer Age and Gender Peachy Permits in Atlanta All the 12s Seattle Police Stops by Officer Age and Gender May 11, 2018 var divElement = document.getElementById('viz1613350572536'); var vizElement = divElement.getElementsByTagName('object')[0]; vizElement.style.minWidth='420px';vizElement.style.maxWidth='650px';vizElement.style.width='100%';vizElement.style.minHeight='587px';vizElement.style.maxHeight='887px';vizElement.style.height=(divElement.offsetWidth*0.75)+'px'; var scriptElement = document.createElement('script'); scriptElement.src = 'https://public.tableau.com/javascripts/api/viz_v1.js'; vizElement.parentNode.insertBefore(scriptElement, vizElement); Peachy Permits in Atlanta Mar 15, 2015 var divElement = document. /2020/12/23/a-case-for-allcaps/ Wed, 23 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /2020/12/23/a-case-for-allcaps/ Recently I resumed PPE allocation duties for a couple of weeks and took the opportunity to automate a checklist of the orders sorted by region to help track weekly orders by the Warehouse team. As a data person, I couldn’t help but add scope creep by adding a secondary sort by facility name. The resulting data surprised me when I noticed that the secondary sort placed facilities with names in ALL CAPS before other facilities with Title Case names. /2020/11/17/refactoring-racist-language/ Tue, 17 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /2020/11/17/refactoring-racist-language/ Words matter. When used thoughtfully they can include an entire group of a people. They can acknowledge that a person exists, that you know their name and even how they pronounce it. Words can be used to put people down deliberately, which obviously isn’t cool, but more dangerously, they can obstinately be retained in everyday language when we don’t consider them in the context of their usage over time. /2020/10/11/spreadsheet-love/ Sun, 11 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /2020/10/11/spreadsheet-love/ I unapologetically love excel spreadsheets. As a data analyst I am happy to explore a downloaded file with power query, calculations and pivot tables to quickly get a grasp of a data situation. As a developer and architect I hate repetitive actions and challenge myself to do better than opening a spreadsheet when I need a quick data answer. /2020/04/25/virginia-is-for-design-thinkers/ Sat, 25 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /2020/04/25/virginia-is-for-design-thinkers/ Due to the fairly new requirement for 20 hours of continuing education to renew ones Certified Scrum Master certification, I have been desperately searching for free, inexpensive but interesting coursework to satisfy that requirement. My first port of call was to check out Mike Cohn’s Mountain Goat Software site that has served me well as a web developer and tech pm and discovered some sweet SEU resources. I then headed to my favorite online learning haven, Coursera and discovered the course, Agile Meets Design Thinking and was pleased to see that it’s another University of Virginia Darden School of Business offering. /2020/02/01/rstudio-conf-top-n-5-2020/ Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /2020/02/01/rstudio-conf-top-n-5-2020/ San Francisco is awesome! My conference top 5 sessions Debugging should be Delightful It’s about providing service and even more so self-service RMarkdown Driven Development (RmdDD) is possible and is happening! Teaching should be Delightful and giraffe-full! Sports for the Win! San Francisco is awesome! It was a no brainer in 2019 after attending the Austin conference to immediately register for the 2020 conference in San Francisco, a short jaunt from Seattle. /2020/01/04/mapping-5-years-of-government-data/ Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /2020/01/04/mapping-5-years-of-government-data/ This January I celebrate 5 years consulting with government agencies all across the country and even in Canada and the Netherlands! Below is a map I made of customers by braod topic and type of data product. At one time I believe I was the preeminent data consultant on legal cannabis data with customers on both coasts! /2019/12/26/retrospecting-on-2019/ Thu, 26 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /2019/12/26/retrospecting-on-2019/ Oh 2019, What a Year! Educating Alicia Great Books about Data! Conferences, Courses and the Cloud Professional and Personal Contributions in 4 Quarters Q1 - Connecting with Customers Meta Analysis and Dashboarding Flexing R Dashboards Publishing all things with Python Q2 - Communicating Well with Data A blog is born! Word, Reports with Data and Friendly Language for All Thematic stories with 3rd Party Data Q3 - Building Useful Things Powering NYC’s annual report with all the Analytics Data And again for Federal Insights Queuing up (and scoring) my next Reads Q4 - Unleashing even more Data BEAutiful Economic Analysis API Untangling a BLS Mess Making Sense of the Census Merry New Year! /2019/06/02/judging-a-book-by-its-description/ Sun, 02 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /2019/06/02/judging-a-book-by-its-description/ I love to read books, especially mystery books by my favorite authors (Louise Penny, Fred Vargas, Kate Atkinson, Nancy Atherton and Jussi Adler-Olsen). They are all authors who have crafted a wonderful cast of thoughtful characters in picturesque settings. I live in Seattle, which is also picturesque (especially in the summer) but I do enjoy considering what life must be like in Quebec, France, England and Denmark. Since this group may only reasonably create and publish 1 book a year, I do have a larger group of authors in my reading portfolio because I may read a new book every 2-3 weeks if book releases go my way. /2019/04/21/visualizing-and-benchmarking-open-data-catalogs/ Sun, 21 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /2019/04/21/visualizing-and-benchmarking-open-data-catalogs/ A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to co-present a session called Visualizing your data, the Power of BI with Seattle’s Open Data manager, Paul Alley at the 2019 Tyler Connect conference in Dallas. For our session we wanted to use Power BI to spin up reports on the health of Seattle’s Open Data Catalog because Power BI makes it very easy to connect to data sources, add calculations, visualize the results and drilldown into various facets of the data with an interactive report. /2019/03/10/exploring-shiny-open-data/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /2019/03/10/exploring-shiny-open-data/ I haven’t been an active participant of the RStudio Community (yet), but saw in an e-mail that there was a shiny contest, https://community.rstudio.com/t/take-part-in-the-shiny-contest/22445 and took the opportunity to submit a couple of the shiny apps that I built last year after being inspired by Michigan’s own Justin Baker when he presented a Flex Dashboard at Socrata Connect, Using Open Analytics to Improve Government Performance. Discovery API The Discovery API returns all data found on Socrata client domains. /about/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /about/ My Data Story Democratizing data and analytics for the last 6 years in government developing data programs and creating a culture of data sharing to inform decisions and deliver equitable outcomes My journey to data has included a path as a web developer, technical project manager, data analyst and solutions architect Advocate and practicioner of Agile and Continuous Improvement methodologies Full Resume made with pagedown! Or download as a lovely pdf. /2019/03/06/census-and-a-coordinate-conundrums-in-california/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /2019/03/06/census-and-a-coordinate-conundrums-in-california/ Background Over the last couple of years I have had the opportunity to work on projects that provide financial, demographic and indicator data from a geographical perspective so that people can find their location on a map and discover information about their locality and how they compare to their neighbors and ideally peers. Geographies of data In order to associate data like debt burden, population density, and such, we needed some field that identified the locality so that it would show up on the map, ideally in the correct spot. /2018/05/18/oh-data-discovering-insights-with-odata-with-all-the-tools/ Fri, 18 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 /2018/05/18/oh-data-discovering-insights-with-odata-with-all-the-tools/ At Socrata Connect, I had the opportunity to lead a session on loading various datasets from our customers via OData in Tableau, Power BI and Excel. Power BI In this demo I join data from the CDC (Centers for Disease Controls) 500 Cities: Local Data for Better Health, with Commute Time for Census Tracts in Los Angeles county and look for relationships via a scatter plot in this Power BI report. /2018/04/10/getting-meta-in-mesa/ Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 /2018/04/10/getting-meta-in-mesa/ Metadata can sometimes be an afterthought in the data publishing process and become a cumbersome task for technology teams when deferred until the end of a project. It is however the most important step for data publishers who aspire to high data discovery and appropriate usage of the data by all consumers. During a mass data migration event, an opportunity presented itself to the city of Mesa to make it a trivial task to review and improve their metadata. /2017/08/15/pydata-2017-a-visualization-exploration/ Tue, 15 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 /2017/08/15/pydata-2017-a-visualization-exploration/ PyData 2017, held on the Microsoft campus in the summer of 2017 featured many awesome speakers sharing their visualization libraries. Here are some examples using my own data to take them out on a spin. Visualization Notebook! library(htmltools) # jupyter nbconvert --to html ~/repos/blog/notebooks/visualizations_demo.ipynb includeHTML("../../notebooks/visualizations_demo.html") visualizations_demo /*! * * Twitter Bootstrap * */ /*! * Bootstrap v3.3.7 (http://getbootstrap.com) * Copyright 2011-2016 Twitter, Inc. * Licensed under MIT (https://github. /2017/08/15/pydata-2017-fun-and-fast-with-dask/ Tue, 15 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 /2017/08/15/pydata-2017-fun-and-fast-with-dask/ PyData 2017, held on the Microsoft campus in the summer of 2017 included a tutorial on improving performance with the library dask. Dask Notebook! Due to the size of the html generated for this notebook and it crashing on render, it’s best viewed directly via dask_demo.html until I see if I can reduce file from 1.9 MB. library(htmltools) # jupyter nbconvert --to html ~/repos/blog/notebooks/dask_demo.ipynb # includeHTML("../../notebooks/dask_demo.html") Resources Notebook - https://github. /2017/04/05/spark-live-seattle-exploring-payroll-data-with-python-r-scala-and-sql/ Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 /2017/04/05/spark-live-seattle-exploring-payroll-data-with-python-r-scala-and-sql/ Interactive Notebooks with all the languages Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend Spark Live Seattle hosted by Databricks, the company behind the development of Spark. Spark is a computing engine that allows you to analyze, transform and run models on your data. I have been extremely interested in learning more about Spark so that I can use SQL, python and R all in the same interactive notebook AND also run them on a cluster rather than my laptop. /2016/04/16/hacking-the-census-api/ Sat, 16 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 /2016/04/16/hacking-the-census-api/ Throughout my career at Socrata I often have the opportunity to find ways to get external data from APIs like the Census and Bureau of Labor & Statistics to help customers benchmark themselves against their peers. Here’s a presentation I gave about one such adventure using FME + python + the Census API for the City of New Orleans. Hack The Census, Unleash the Power of Data from Safe Software Lessons Learned Variables estimated by the Census may become more granular over time and it’s important to check categorical data for all years to either roll them if you want to track the same variable over time.