Hi! Hello! Howdy! It has been a minute since I’ve written a new post for this site (approx. 881,280 minutes to be more percise). The radio silence has largely been due to a number of life changes that have left me working on personal side projects quite a bit less and thus posting here less. I do have a number of “irons in the fire” as they say, but since who knows when they’ll be ready to go, I figured I would just share a mass update on all that has been going on in the last 18 months or so.

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Work + Project Updates

• I’ve had the amazing opportunity to work on some projects with The Markup, including stories on discrimination in the mortgage industry, anti-competitive practices from Amazon, and the unfair system of how donated organs are allocated throughout the country.
  • One of the very cool things about working with The Markup, beyond the fact that their work is hugely important by their readers, is that their work just makes a ton of waves in important spots. See these examples of references to some of the work I was able to help out on: Congress RE: Amazon, Dept. of Justice RE: mortgage redlining, Last Week Tonight RE: Amazon, Google, and other tech monopolies
• I’ve also been posting periodically over on Observable (as I previously mentioned). It has been a great place to play around with stuff and experiment on things in a lower polish environment. Here are some of the things I worked on:
  • My tutorial on using d3-force got some traction, which was cool!
  • I recreated some of my own work related to visualizing musical genres in a 2D map (and set up some code to scrape the ever-changing genre landscape)
  • Back when Wordle was all the rage, I put together this Wordle Results Tracker to play around with the data (plus I wrote some code for scraping Wordle results from Twitter)
  • I made a map analyzing the relationship between partisanship and MLB fandoms, as a sequel to this older project
  • I also recreated a bunch of work from other folks, which really helped me work on my own skills! Some examples ⇒ from Lazaro Gamio at NYT, from Will Chase at Axios, from The Washington Post, from Danielle Alberti at Axios, from The Marshall Project
• While working on some of the above projects, inspired by some data viz/coding Twitch streamers, I dabbled in recording my project work. Please be gentle if you choose to watch 🙃
• As part of my day-job, I’ve had the chance to more thoroughly enjoy all the amazing stuff getting published across the web so I wanted to better document some of the amazing stuff that inspires me - maybe it’ll inspire you too! Check it out over on Notion.
• Speaking of Notion, once Heroku decided to get rid of their free tier, I decided to migrate some of the content from my website over to Notion as well - feel free to check it out on my public BT Notion.

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Other Personal Updates

• I got a new job at Spotify in May 2021! I’m a data scientist and data visualization specialist who focuses on helping understand and visualize trends in music and talk (podcast, radio) content on Spotify.
• I got engaged in May 2022! My fiancée and I (and Penny) are all very excited!

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And that’s about it! As I mentioned, I am working on other stuff, but I’m unsure when exactly they’ll be out and/or shared here, so until then, feel free to check for other updates on Twitter and Notion. Peace out for now!