Just a place for some of my ideas.
To protect folks’ privacy, I’ve avoided using names throughout the post. At the top of every production data pipeline I've written, I print out a Lord of the Rings quote as an Easter Egg for any future developers/analysts who pick up the code. Keeping
The story of one of my most humbling moments, and a pretty important part of the lead-up to why I wanted to study transportation.
I figure out how to create a 3D population density map in R after coming across a cool post on Mastodon.
Stepping into my first computer science class in 2012, I was surprised to see a desktop computer and monitor at each seat in the classroom. It was a far cry from classrooms I was used to, and the computers weren't running Windows 7 or OS X Lion. Instead, they were running images of Ubuntu.
I recently left my role at New York City Transit to move to Washington D.C. As part of leaving, I wrote an article for my old department's newsletter, which I've adapted to remove some names/details and republished it.
Discussing my experience falling in love with biking for practical reasons in NYC.
Relying on humans with busy schedules to spend time each day sending recurring emails is going to lead to missed emails and errors. Automate them instead!
Even though I spent almost the entire summer and Fall in New York City, I ventured into Pennsylvania a couple times to catch up with friends outdoors and get a break from the city.
I happen to have a lot of knowledge working in R and LaTeX left over from the days when I thought I would be an academic, so when I needed to automate a weekly report, they fit the bill.
Back in the spring of 2019, I had the opportunity to visit my then fiancée (now wife) in Tampere, Finland. She was living there for a few months working, and I was glad to get the chance to take a week off from work and spend some time with her while exploring the two largest cities.
Other than the 10 days I spent locked in the bedroom with COVID-19 (0/10, would not recommend), life has settled into an uneventful routine. Here's what it looks like.
After using Cmder for three years, it was time to try out Alacritty, a new GPU accelerated terminal emulator built in Rust.
On Sunday, March 15th the governor required all nonessential state employees to work from home, including all of us at the MTA. While the IT department directed employees to use Teams and Webex for remote work, unfortunately the organization also had a fairly active Slack subscription as well...
After a new city program to promote reading, Taylor ended up in charge of measuring how many people actually brought in books to get their free coffee. While Taylor is not a statistician, they do have a leg up their sleeve.
Most large transit agencies have research groups whose full time job it is to analyze operational data, but they often face strict restrictions publishing data. With historic records of real-time data though, academics and nonprofits can perform their own creative analyses.