bengarvey.com

Author: bengarvey

  • Real Work

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    I want to talk about real work and fake work. We have 1:1’s, standup meetings, team meetings, check-ins, all-hands, and serendipitous meetings at the coffee machine. How long did you spend writing google docs, emails, slack chats, gchats, hipchats, and wikis? What percentage of your day comprised of tuning your vimrc/emacs/bashrc and organizing your trello…

  • Best Things This Year (2015)

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    If 2013 was the year I shook up my life, and 2014 was the year I learned how to succeed in it, 2015 was about challenging myself not to accept the easiest trajectory. 2015 was a busy year and it threw interesting things my way. Sometimes that was difficult, even hopeless, but I will never…

  • 10 Things I’m Doing After Reading The Principles of Product Development Flow

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in , , ,

    A few weeks ago I showed this slide during a talk I gave to clients of RJMetrics. The Goal is legendary in my family as a guide for unlocking throughput in manufacturing. Garvey Corp’s entire business model is helping companies exploit constraints and increase profits. It got me off to a great start in manufacturing,…

  • Best Things This Year (2014)

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    What I like about 2014 was that it was more about things I built, rather than found and enjoyed. 1. Lineage How do you browse 250 years of genealogical data? My Aunt Peggy has been doing genealogical research for decades and I created a system to view this data and show family relationships. I demoed…

  • Presentation on Data Expression

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    Here’s a link to the presentation I gave on October 30th at the Digital Analytics Association Symposium on Data Visualization and Expression. It’s improved since I gave my first talk on the subject at IgnitePhilly 11. One of my goals this year was to do more public speaking at bigger events. I’m glad I did…

  • 2014 Digital Analytics Association Talk on October 30th

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    I’m excited to be giving a talk on Data Expression at this year’s Digital Analytics Symposium in Philadelphia. Some information about the event: Thursday, October 30, 2014 12:30pm – 6:30pm University of Pennsylvania Houston Hall 3417 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6306 Digital Analytics – Art, Science or Both? Stitching together the infrastructure, systems, methods and…

  • Introducing Kids Morning Adventure!

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in ,

    So excited for this! After a year of work, I’m finally releasing my gamfication system for getting kids ready for school, called Kids Morning Adventure. It ended up being very similar to my RPG for kids, Kids Dungeon Adventure, but refined for the busy morning schedule.

  • Ingenious Review

    Ingenious Review

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    In America there is no shortage of digital inventors, tinkerers, hackers, and dreamers. Companies form around the most ridiculous ideas, test them in the marketplace, often with unpredictable and surprising results. It’s an exciting time for innovators in the information age. Go back one hundred years and you’ll find a similar state in the automobile…

  • VizWar @ Philly Tech Week 2014

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    Fellow RJMetrician Austin Lopez and I competed in a data visualization contest/hackathon called VizWars at WHYY last night. It was hosted by Acumen Analytics and Tableau. The goal was to come up with the best visualization from either NCAA Basketball tournament statistics or Earthquake data they provided. This is what we came up with. The…

  • Announcing Lineage: A Family Tree Data Expression Engine

    Announcing Lineage: A Family Tree Data Expression Engine

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in , , , ,

    Last week at the Philly JS Dev meetup, I demoed a new project I’ve been working on called Lineage. It all started as a way to try and visualize all the research my Aunt Peggy has done over the last 50 years. Using D3, I was able to build a way to search, filter and…

  • Best Things This Year (2013)

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in , , , , , , , ,

    Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of people shook up their lives in 2013. I certainly did. Here are the best things that happened to me in 2013. 1. RJMetrics – In March I started working at RJMetrics, an e-commerce data analytics firm in center city Philadelphia. Leaving Garvey Corp was a difficult decision, but…

  • D3.js Talk at Philly JS Meetup

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in ,

    I’m going to give a talk titled Data Expression with D3 and Null Family Values at the Philly Javascript Dev meetup on January, 22. I’ll also be giving a demonstration of an awesome D3 project I’ve been working on. Here’s a sneak peak:

  • Civic Hacking Demo Night Talk

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    Tonight (Friday) I’m going to be talking about the Bulldog Budget and what I think Philadelphia can do to improve their open budget efforts. Details here. Update: The event went great, here’s a photo someone from Technically Philly took:

  • HOWTO: Build an Automatic Gong

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    I made my first post over at the RJMetrics Engineering blog about how we built an automatic gong that rings whenever we get a new client.

  • Show at Grooveground Friday 6/7/13 with Arcati Crisis

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    I’ll be playing with Arcati Crisis on Friday, 6/7/13 at Grooveground. The show starts at 8:30PM!

  • My Ignite Philly 11 Presentation on Data Visualization

    My Ignite Philly 11 Presentation on Data Visualization

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    Update: Here’s the video of my presentation Last Thursday I gave a talk on Data Visualization at Ignite Philly 11. I was nervous as hell, but the encouragement you get from that crowd is amazing. The organizers (David, Geoff and Adam) did a great job and it could not have gone smoother. Here are my…

  • Media Roundup for Mandel Bulldog Budget

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in ,

    The reaction to the Mandel for Controller Bulldog Budget has been amazing! Here’s a list of all the places it was mentioned online. Technically Philly – “Use the coolest, most comprehensive City of Philadelphia budget visualization you’ve ever seen” Made it to story #4 on Hacker News with over 60 comments Tons of activity on…

  • Philadelphia Budget Data Visualized

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in ,

    For the past few months I’ve been working with Brett Mandel on creating a data visualization of Philadelphia’s General budget. We used a treepmap from D3 to show expenditures categorized by department, but lets you drill down to al 217,450 expenditures.     We’re launching it today, so check it out and see what you…

  • Best Things This Year (2012)

    Best Things This Year (2012)

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    Last year I did a loosely types list of all the best things from 2011, and here’s my list for 2012. Not all are new (even to me), but they stood out in 2012. 11. Solved a Family Mystery 10. Travel – Saw some great places this year including the Alamo, Niagara Falls, a Phillies…

  • World’s Tiniest Minecraft Island

    —

    by

    bengarvey
    in

    Sasha and I have been playing Minecraft lately and looking out in the ocean we saw something interesting. It turned out to be the world’s tiniest island. Interesting side note about Minecraft: Each world is generated randomly and cover 9 million times the surface area of the Earth!