U.S. Births by Parental Age, 1969–2024
An animated heatmap of every U.S. birth by mother and father age, 1969–2024 — watch the joint distribution of parental ages slide older across 56 years.
AaronJBecker.com
An eclectic collection of thoughts, notes, and projects.
Latest posts
Painless PhotoSwipe Lightboxes for Astro MDX Blog Posts
How to integrate PhotoSwipe with Astro's MDX content and image optimization pipelines for a performant, painless image gallery experience in Astro blog posts.
diasporas and transplants: migrations between US states
1/3 of US-born Americans live in a different state from where they were born. Let's look at the states people leave, stay, and move to.
syncing life stages: trends in parental age by educational attainment
In the US, more educated mothers are not only older, on average, but also closer in age to their male partners. Between 2010 and 2024, age gaps have narrowed at every level of parental education.
thirties are the new twenties: US births by maternal age group
Working in from the extremes, every maternal age cohort has swapped places sometime in the last decade.
twin ridges: visualizing housing expensiveness trends across US states
Nearly every US state follows a similar "twin-peaked" pattern of housing expensiveness, with peaks occurring around the pre-2008 housing bubble and the post-COVID housing market surge.
real median household income growth by state since 1984
By definition, households live together, making median household income a relevant metric for housing affordability.
twin peaks: housing expensiveness by state, 2000-2025
Visualizing trends in median home value vs. median household income at the state level from 2000 to 2025.
getting older: children vs. total population in the US
Fewer Americans are children, yet there are more American children than ever.
good news about young adult parenthood rates in the US
Fewer young adults are having children; the pandemic accelerated this trend, but it's not a new phenomenon. Hooray!
creating attractive color-coded state maps in python
Creating a map in the matplotlib ecosystem isn't easy, but the degree of control you get does allow for some powerful customizations.
astro & away we go!
Astro is a relatively new frontend framework that's particularly well-suited to building a developer blog.
Slashing URLs with Astro and Nginx
Default Astro and Nginx behaviors redirect to URLs with trailing slashes, which is great for SEO and user experience.
Jupyter Notebooks Are Like Spreadsheets
Data scientists use Jupyter notebooks the same way that financial analysts use Excel spreadsheets, with many of the same pros and cons.
Add diagrams to your Astro site with D2
A guide to adding flowcharts and diagrams to your Astro site using D2, a text-to-diagram tool. Tips on docker build and clutter control.
Mermaid vs D2: Comparing Open-Source Text-to-Diagram Tools
A comparison of the open-source text-to-diagram tools Mermaid.Js and D2, with a focus on developer experience, unique capabilities, and rendering workflows.
Self-Hosted Site Analytics with Umami, Docker, and Traefik
Integrating Umami, a privacy-focused, open source analytics service, into a self-hosted stack built with Docker Compose and fronted by a Traefik reverse proxy.
Umami vs Plausible vs Matomo for Self-Hosted Analytics
Comparing Umami, Plausible, and Matomo, three popular self-hosted Google Analytics alternatives, as well as brief glances at GoatCounter, Fathom, and PostHog.
Client-Side vs Server-Side Analytics
The way we build and deploy websites nowadays makes tracking user behavior in the browser more straightforward than server-side tracking.
Astro + Nginx: Caching Headers for Static Assets
How to set caching headers for static assets in an Astro + Nginx Docker container.
Add Brotli Compression to Your Nginx Docker Container
In this post we'll build a slim, up-to-date Nginx container with Brotli to host this blog.
Choosing an Astro Template: Style versus Substance
Choosing between AstroPaper and Astro Cactus, two popular Astro blog templates, ultimately boils down to a question of style versus substance.
Deploying Astro with Docker Compose and Traefik
How I serve my Astro blog from a Docker container on my own server, and how I deploy it using a bare-bones bash script with SSH agent forwarding.
Minify, Compress, and Containerize Your Astro Site
Minify, compress, and containerize your Astro site with @playform/compress, astro-compressor, and nginx-brotli.
Fontsource, Fontaine, Tailwind and Vite
Using Fontsource together with Fontaine to self-host fonts with fallbacks in Astro or SvelteKit, integrating with Tailwind, compared to font preloading.