RSSAmplifier

Blog

Normally Distributed

A weekly newsletter about all things data.

normallydistributed.devRSS feed ↗15 posts

Latest posts

Seven Pieces of Career Advice I Wish Someone Had Told Me

I have an unofficial rule on this blog: no listicles. Consider this post a rule-breaker: seven pieces of career advice, gathered the hard way. I recently crossed the ten-year mark in tech, and these are the things I find myself repeating to mentees — and honestly, to myself

Introducing Flora 🌱: A Diagram Library Built With (and For) AI

Ten days ago, I started building a diagram library from scratch. Today I'm releasing Flora – a fault-tolerant, Mermaid -compatible diagram library that renders polished, interactive SVGs from imperfect input. I want to talk about Flora, but I also want to talk about how it got built,

The Illusion of Determinism

A few months ago, I participated in a company-wide hackathon with a group of data engineers. The project was straightforward enough: build tooling to automate some of our data modeling conventions – tasks like auto-generating documentation, scaffolding schema files, and enforcing naming patterns. The kind of stuff that

The Explore-Exploit Tradeoff for AI Tools

I've been spending a lot of time lately figuring out which AI tools to invest in. New models, new frameworks, new CLI tools, new IDE integrations (or no IDE at all?!). The ecosystem is moving so fast that just orienting yourself feels like a project in its own

The Case for Professional Pseudocoding

I've been using Claude Code almost every day for over six months now, and the thing that surprises me most isn't how fast it is. It's how quickly it exposes the gaps in my own thinking. I'll prompt something like "clean

Moltbook: the Most Sci-Fi Experiment in AI Right Now

If you've been following AI news lately, you've probably heard about the viral rise of Moltbook . The concept is wild: a Reddit-style social network exclusively for AI agents. Bots post, comment, and interact with each other while humans can only watch. Within 48 hours of

How I’m Adapting My Data Engineering Workflow in an AI-First World

I’ve been back at work for three weeks after seven-and-a-half months of maternity leave, and it genuinely feels like I've returned to a completely different industry. The fundamentals haven't changed: data pipelines still break in unexpected ways, and tech debt still

Building a Choropleth Map

Last week, I followed the 2025 New York City mayoral election and was so impressed by how clearly the New York Times visualized the election results . Their choropleth map did a great job of capturing the city's political mood at a glance. You can see entire boroughs tilt

More Thoughts on Marimo...

After testing Marimo for a few real analyses, I found myself missing Jupyter. From missing terminal commands to no autosave and AI model lock-in, here’s what I’ve learned — and why I’m still not ready to give up on Jupyter just yet.

Visualizing Strava Data: Lessons from Geospatial Data in Python

This past summer, I started using Strava as a kind of diary to record my walks and runs while on maternity leave. Between nap schedules and coffee runs, I ended up exploring several new coffee shops and walking routes around the neighbourhood. By the end of summer, I had logged

The Data Science of Dating Apps: A Hypothetical Case Study

When I meet other data scientists in the wild, my favorite question to ask is this: If you could get your hands on any dataset in the world, what would it be? For me, the answer is easy — dating app data . I've always been fascinated by how

Is Marimo the New Jupyter Notebook?

I've been using Jupyter notebooks for almost a decade to power everything from quick exploratory data analyses to end-to-end machine learning prototypes. While these notebooks have served their purpose, I'm sure that the majority of data scientists will agree that they also come with

6 Ways to Optimize BigQuery Queries (and Save Time & Money)

BigQuery is powerful — but it can also be expensive and slow if you don’t know what you’re doing. It's easy to accidentally scan terabytes of data when you only meant to query a few gigabytes. Mistakes like these can end up costing hundreds

What the Duck is DuckDB?!

Let's dig into what DuckDB is and why there's so much hype around it.

5 BigQuery Features Every Data Scientist Should Know

After working with BigQuery for almost five years, here are five features that I wish I knew about earlier in my career.