Recent content on Call me Ben
Spoiler alert: neither of them is a resume. Data science interviews can be tough. As data scientists, we can be expected to serve a sort of swiss-army knife function between business intelligence, software engineering, machine learning, data analysis, and product. On top of that, all companies use data scientists differently, and their respective interviews reflect that by spanning a wide array of…
I was walking home from the park today. The road home from my local park splits into two paths shortly before I reach my apartment. There’s the one which is quite wide and cars even drive on sometimes; it’s convenient for carrying bags or groceries, is suitable for bicycles, and it runs directly adjacent to a series of apartment buildings. Then there’s the other path that runs…
Leveraging the power in your geospatial data – with code! Many of today’s most competitive tech markets involve points moving around on a map: ride-hailing services (Uber, Lyft, Grab), micromobility services (Lime, Bird), food delivery services (Delivery Hero, Postsmates, Doordash), and more. Moreover, many services that don’t place customers’ locations at the center of their product…
Transitioning from Pandas to Polars the easy way – by taking a pit stop at SQL. The secret’s out! Polars is the hottest thing on the block, and everybody wants a slice 😎 I recently wrote a post, “The 3 Reasons I Permanently Switched From Pandas to Polars”, because, well, this is the most common use-case for Polars – as a drop-in replacement for Pandas, for doing single-node data…
Geospatial indexing, or Geocoding, is the process of indexing latitude-longitude pairs to small subdivisions of geographical space, and it is a technique that we data scientists often find ourselves using when faced with geospatial data. Though the first popular geospatial indexing technique “Geohash” was invented as recently as 2008, indexing latitude-longitude pairs to manageable…
“What is language for? It’s not just the naming of things, is it? It’s the lifeblood of a culture, a people.” JRR Tolkien, in the film Tolkien. We all have different reasons for learning a language: for some, a job or an opportunity might have brought them to a country where they don’t speak the language; for others, it could be an effort to learn more about our own…
“The only way to go fast is to go well.” - Martin Fowler A Tale of Two Programmers Joe and Jane are university students taking the same “Introduction to Programming” course, and they’ve just been given the final project: build a Tetris clone! Nervous that they will complete such a big project in time, they both go home and get started right away. Joe starts writing…
I came for the speed, but I stayed for the syntax. At the time of writing this post, it’s been six years since I landed my first job in data science. And, for those entire six years spent doing data science, Pandas has been the foundation of all my work: exploratory data analyses, impact analyses, data validations, model experimentation, you name it. My career was built on top of Pandas!
After reading this article, you’ll never use a histogram again. The modern data scientist swims in an ocean of plotting techniques. From matplotlib to ggplot2; from plotly to d3.js; from histograms, to box plots, to scatter plots, to whatever crazy chart seaborn comes up with next; it can be hard for data scientists to make sense of it all! But worry no longer. Empirical Cumulative…
Back when I was learning Portuguese, I often found myself wondering something that most language-learners probably wonder at some point: most verbs seem to follow some pattern, but some verbs have some really weird verb conjugations–what’s up with that? What’s more, why is it that the most common verbs are usually the ones with the most weird conjugations? It’s like someone…
And Then There Were Numbers Sometimes, I like to imagine the moment that the Set of Natural Numbers was invented. It goes a little bit like this: Stage Left: Curt the Caveman walks in to Mack the Caveman’s cave; Mack is picking his teeth with a bone. MACK: “Hey, Curt!" CURT: “Mack! Great to see you. Beautiful day for tooth-pickin’, huh?" MACK: “You bet, Curt. To what…
For the past year, I’ve been helping small businesses discover and leverage the immense value locked in their data. Before that, I worked for 5+ years as a data scientist and machine learning engineer for top companies, including the publicly listed food-delivery company Delivery Hero and as the founding engineer at a Y-Combinator backed startup. I’ve worked across a number of domains,…