Technical and personal notes from Brian Alexander Lee, technologist/architect/software developer/data engineer/ api guy. Not a work site.
I worked in an organization with lots of processes. I was in an office with no windows, a bit of a hole or maybe even oubliette. You couldn’t tell time of day, weather, etc but it was better than a cubicle. My door opened to a 10 foot hallway with and about 5 feet down there was a large window. It was a weird L-shape and no one else’s office or cube or anything was in the hallway to nowhere. So it…
I climbed Kilimanjaro via the Rongai route in October of 2012, capturing runkeeper, and other metrics all along the way. I’ve also been meaning to write this post since then and it’s taken over 10 years to finally overcome procrastination and write up how I logged my data up to and down from the summit. Planning - what route, when, and what coordinator I think I first wanted to climb Kilimanjaro…
There are a few business urban legends I’ve heard over the years that I try to trace down. It’s interesting to me because some seem simple to source, but end up being not so simple. I try to find the source for Drucker’s quote “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and a more esoteric one about chimpanzees forming a behavior to stop ladder climbers. I feel like there’s lots of these but, for now,…
Thought it would be helpful to describe the various tools and things I use on a day to day basis. Inspired by Stephen Musoke Senkomago who was inspired by Wes Bos’ Uses . These are the tools I use for my personal, teaching, and side projects. Why is this helpful? The older I get the more I wonder if I’m getting out of touch with technology and just using what I know, versus detecting new things to…
I’m really interested in privacy and how my data are collected, used, stored and just in general exists. While I think of my data as mine, the more I think about it, the hazier I am. I think defining ownership more clearly will help me think of what’s possible and then what’s also appropriate and reasonable to do with data. Limits to using my data I was reading about how Google is changing…
I use goodreads a lot because I like to read books and want to find more books to read. This morning I was reading a thread on hackernews on Sarah Manavis’s NewStatesman article and it reminds me of how much I want, I yearn, for useful book recommendations. I think about this pretty much every time I open the goodreads page or app and hope that maybe this is the day they finally fix…
The August 4th explosions in Beirut were very jarring to me due to the loss of human life, and the numerous , direct videos that looked like something out my 80s youth nightmares. Hearing that it was caused by 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate , I started working on my phone to quantify my fear by figuring out how easy it would be to ship that much, and how much it would cost. According to…
Lately I’ve been thinking about data maturity models within large organizations, and how to measure maturity and ability to use data. Specifically, what it means to be data literate or data fluent or whatever buzzword is used to mean “hip and with it like the cool kids” when it comes to being able to collect, sort, order, and use data to the greatest extent possible. To help think this through,…
I like to track my Tableau visualization projects in git to protect against screwups and for curiosity of what previous versions looked like. Theoretically, it might help with collaborators working on the same workbook, but I’ve never actually done that or wanted to do that. I use live updates for my data sets so the .twb files don’t contain sensitive data and the xml is at least possible to get a…
I try to read every book by Neal Stephenson because he writes characters that I wish I could be, or perhaps are the closest to from any other characters in fiction. I was excited when Fall; or, Dodge in Hell came out. So excited that I accidentally ordered two hard copies, received one as a gift, and bought the audible version to listen to on my commute. The book is great in general, but…