blog

  • Best Things This Year (2022)

    Best Things This Year (2022)

    Disclaimer: This post was written by ChatGPT. It’s been quite a year for Ben Garvey in 2022. He traveled to a number of exciting destinations, including San Francisco, Austin, New York, Iowa, Maine, and Chicago. Along the way, he experienced some ups and downs, including the loss of his Uncle Mike and Aunt Betty, who…

  • Requiem for a Jacket

    Requiem for a Jacket

    It’s time to get rid of a jacket I’ve had for a long time. I don’t remember exactly when I got it. Sometime between 2006 and 2009. Maybe at the Cherry Hill Mall Macy’s. The jacket has been with me almost my entire adult life. It’s still in pretty good shape, too, but just doesn’t…

  • Chili Oil Ramen

    Chili Oil Ramen

    Over the last year Sasha got way into Ramen. She’s soft boiling eggs, making her own broth, growing basil, making me take her to the best Philly spots (Hiro, 11th & Chestnut), etc. but after a lot of trial and error I think we’ve settled on a god tier ramen recipe that’s easy to make.…

  • Best Things This Year (2021)

    Best Things This Year (2021)

    Well, we’re still in year 2 of this pandemic. I feel lucky my family is vaccinated, boosted and able to fend off one covid case. But it’s still sad we haven’t returned to the world we had in 2019. I’m still hopeful we can in some ways, but things will always be different. 2021 was…

  • Impossible Korean Beef Recipe

    Impossible Korean Beef Recipe

    I’m still eating meat, but I’ve been experimenting with Impossible Meat and I’ve made this recipe a bunch of times now and I love it. The only tough to find ingredient is the gochujang. I got mine at HMart. 3 Tbsp gochujang3 Tbsp soy sauce1 tsp garlic powder1/2 tsp red pepper flakes1 tsp sugar2 Tbsp…

  • Best Things This Year (2020)

    Best Things This Year (2020)

    Anything I write about 2020 won’t convey how different it was from any year of our lives. I came into the year optimistic about the new decade, but 3 months in everything changed with the COVID-19 pandemic. My office closed and my team shifted to remote work. My kids are in remote school and everything…

  • 5 Things You Can Do With csvkit

    Recently I wrote a post about building tiny data pipelines with bash and the most common feedback was that people hadn’t heard of csvkit before. It’s fairly new to me, too, so here are some things to get you started. CSV stands for comma separated values and it’s the most common data format for flat,…

  • Schmedium Data: Building little data pipelines with bash

    Schmedium Data: Building little data pipelines with bash

    Over at plotdevice.bengarvey.com I have a bunch of one-off dataviz projects, experiments, and analyses. They all run on data, but sometimes it’s not easy to get, so I end up trimming and transforming data into something I can work with. We’re not talking about big data here, more like small or medium data. Schmedium data.…

  • Best things this year (2019)

    It’s hard to shake off failure. I did a lot in 2019, but it doesn’t always feel that way. I felt lonely, but made 100+ new friends. I didn’t ship enough side projects, but I started a new job and hired a bunch of people. I didn’t travel that much, but I gave a talk…

  • Best Things This Year (2018)

    What a year, huh? A favorite comic of mine talks about how we don’t live one life, but eleven and this was the last year of my 5th life. 2018 was one of my best years, but at times it was the the saddest and most difficult. So much ended and so many new things…