Tag: charts

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 we looked forward to in Spring and Summer were cancelled.

I’m getting a divorce and moved out of the house I’ve lived in for 10 years.

Every year I like to look back and reflect on the things I’ve done or enjoyed and despite this awful, isolating year, there were some good moments.

Traveling to Punxsutawney, PA for Groundhog Day
Sometime in January I watched Groundhog Day with the kids and Sasha pounded her fist on the table and said “let’s go” so we drove 273 miles to Punxsutawney and stood outside in the cold for 4 hours to see Phil emerge. It was the best thing I did all year.

Me and Sasha and 20,000 people watching Phil not see his shadow
We arrived at 3AM and this was as close as we could get.


Hosting Alberto Cairo for the Philadelphia Data Visualization Meetup
We invited one of my favorite authors and dataviz experts to talk about his book and he was all set to fly to Philadelphia from Miami, but COVID forced this to be a virtual event. We had a great time anyway and hope to be back with more dataviz events in 2021.

Hosted a Dataviz Meetup at Drexel
Our last in-person Philly Data Visualization event was at Drexel and we hosted some great speakers such as Ben Kates of Compass Red, Marieke Jackson of Code for Philly, and Pulitzer Prize winner Nathaniel Lash of the Philadelphia Inquirer (now NYT)

Made some charts
Didn’t break too much new ground here, but I made a treemap of my meetup’s most popular hex codes, a force directed graph, a visualization of Dungeon Adventure’s sales, and an update to my Automobile Death chart.

Automobile deaths 1899-2018. Shows a large increase and then a slow decrease from 1971 on. The chart shows the decrease is primarily due to a reduction in alcohol related deaths.

Watched an absolute ton of TV
DARK
ALLLL of Portlandia
The Boys
Lovecraft Country
What We Do in the Shadows
Halt and Catch Fire
The Mandalorian
Clone Wars
I May Destroy You
Finally finished The Leftovers
The Americans
Electric Dreams

Took a lot of selfies
You can watch my hair and beard grow as the days fly by. I think I only had one haircut in 2020.

Follow me on Instagram before I delete that, too.

Played some Dungeon World
Before quarantine we had an irregularly scheduled RPG group that became a weekly thing via Zoom. We usually play Dungeon World, a simplified D&D type game where I assume the role of Yegg the Thief, an upperclass outcast who takes what he wants and occasionally performs incredible feats of agility.


Competed in the virtual Odyssey of the Mind World Finals
Our the tournament was cancelled just days before we were supposed to compete, but my Odyssey of the Mind team participated in a virtual world finals. It was fun, but not as much as competing in person. I’ve been coaching a lot of these kids for 5 years now, including Sasha, and this was the best solution they’ve come up with so far. It’s disappointing the judges didn’t get to see the tale of con-artist Judy the Sloth Lady in person. I was so proud of them.


I was listed in Technically’s Top 100 Philadelphia Connectors in 2020
I like to refer to this at Philly Tech’s 100 Under 100 list.

Raised over $1000
At the start of the pandemic I noticed sales of Kids Dungeon Adventure going up and I felt bad about profiting from the awful situation everyone was in, so I created a coupon to allow anyone to download it for free and pledged to donate any sales to a local food bank. Many people still paid for it, as the charts below show. In 2020 we donated over $1000 to the FoodBank of South Jersey which does contactless delivery of food for families in need.

Chart showing game sales for the last 9 years. A bit spike in 2011 at launch, a small spike in 2014 at the launch of a similar product, and then a huge spike of paid and free sales in early 2020 at the start of the pandemic.
Sales of Kids Dungeon Adventure went up when I offered a free code.

Helped get rid of Donald Trump
I spent more time and donated more money than any campaign season ever. Participating in Vote Forward was a lot of fun and felt more impactful than just tweeting about it.

Went to San Diego
I almost can’t believe that I went to California in 2020 for a few days. San Diego has always been on my list of cities to visit and it was beautiful.

Had a crazy night in Queen Village
Just read this thread.

Movies
The Lure
Disaster Artist
Knives Out
Parasite
Ex Machina
Another Earth
Rise of Skywalker
Us
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Vice
Jodorowsky’s Dune
The Lighthouse

Music
Hanna by Lomelda
Everybody Works by Jay Som
Microphones in 2020 by The Microphones
Nocturnes No 9 by Chopin
The Barrel by Aldous Harding

Hannah – Sun by Lomelda was my favorite song of 2020

Previous years
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011

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 in Asia and went to New York 60+ times.

I reflect on the year to counteract that feeling.

Me @ the IDG IT Roadmap conference in Seoul

Sasha turned 13 and people have always said, “oh just wait until she’s a teenager!” as if having an antagonistic relationship is a given for parents and teens. It’s clear to me now that this attitude lies in the insecurities of the parents, not the kids. We still get along great.

Sasha wrote a 30,000 word book, acted in multiple plays, and is crushing middle school. Owen grew his hair out, started a YouTube channel, and is crushing me in in Mario Kart. It’s fun to watch them grow independent identities.

Here’s my 2019:

I took a month off

I’ve never taken more than 2 consecutive weeks since I started working. I could have used another month, but having the luxury and privilege to take time off before starting at Betterment was great. I painted the inside of my house, had lunch at Mama’s Falafels, got coffee with everyone, finished The Wire, saw the Liberty Bell, hung out at Indyhall, and more.

Betterment

In February I joined Betterment for Advisors as a senior engineering manager and began recruiting. We added 4 engineers and a designer, and successfully rolled all the engineers from the NY team onto other projects. By the end of 2019 we’ll have 22 people working in the sparkling new Philadelphia office.

Betterment for Advisors Team
The Betterment for Advisors engineering team. Aren’t they great?

This was what I set out to do but to look back and see that it happened is a trip. I’ve learned a lot of Ruby on Rails, leveled up my SQL, and already shipped a few features.

Seoul

It’s still surreal to me that I got on a plane and flew to South Korea for 13 hours, gave a talk at a data conference, and then flew home in the same week. My first trip to Asia was successful.

  • Egg, pork, rice in Korea
    Korean food
  • American Restaurant in Seoul
    American Restaurant in Seoul
  • 3D Exploded view of Subway map in Seoul
    3D Exploded view of Subway map in Seoul
  • Me on the subway
    Me on the subway
  • Monument to Psy's Ganham Style, a statue with two large hands
    Monument to Gangham Style
  • Seemingly the most popular coffee shop in Seoul, A Twosome Place
    Seemingly the most popular coffee shop in Seoul, A Twosome Place
  • Korean BBQ
    Korean BBQ
  • Me in front of a large building with a cute baby in the background.
    Me in front of the Lotte World Tower, the 6th largest building in the world. Also, a very cute baby in the background.
  • Korean fried chicken
    Korean fried chicken
  • People in Seoul at night
    Seoul at night.
  • A white and brown cat I met in Seoul
    At cat I met
  • Presenting at the IDG IT Roadmap conference
  • Would you take advice from this person on your IT Roadmap?

Charts

I didn’t make too many new charts, but the ones I did make were fun. I gave one of my best talks this year at Data Jawn 2019 and showed some of these.

1. Network graph of HBO’s The Wire

Network graph of HBO's The Wire

2. My commute times to NY

3. Owen’s Cafeteria Expenses

Pizza

I became obsessed with making pizza. Prior to this, the only pizza I’d ever made were from Boboli crusts or on top of an English Muffin. Using Joe Beddia’s, Pizza Camp, I made 15 pizzas and I think they started getting good by around #7.

Philly Dataviz Meetup

Herb Lau and I put on 5 killer data visualization meetups with speakers from the Philadelphia Inquirer, SixtySixtyWards.com, CypherPrime, the City Controller’s Office, Vanguard, UPenn, Stitch, and more. 2020 is only going to get better.

Will Stallwood giving a talk on shaders

Harambaby

It might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever made. Enter a year and the name of your baby and it tells you how popular your baby’s name was that year, but it also makes it appear as though Harambe was slightly more popular. The project uses government data from 1880 – 2018 and I mostly used bash and csvkit to construct the dataset.

Finding a Hidden Album

Like hidden treasure chest under the floorboards, I found an early album by the Blow’s Khaela Maricich on Spotify and it made me happy.

Games

My kids are way into board games now and we played a ton of Risk Legacy, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, and Ravine, but our favorite was this beautiful game called Wingspan.

Wingspan

TV

Earlier this year I watched Russian Doll and assumed it would be my favorite but then I watched The Wire, Dark, Pen15, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Watchmen, and Fleabag.

I might have watched too much TV.

Movies

Thanks to a couple of long flights I watched a ton of films this year, but my favorites were Booksmart, Her, and The Favourite.

Music

Bands I saw live: Swearin, Mike Krol, Fuck You Tammy, and A Giant Dog. Not too many, but according to Spotify this was my favorite song of the year:

I also enjoyed Palehound, Nana Grizol, Mike Krol, Swearin, Best Friends Forever, Lomedla, Radiator Hospital, Anna McClellan, Mitski, Theo and the Get Down Stay Down, and Lizzo.

My top 2019 list according to Spotify.

I got another tattoo and sometimes wear glasses

I got a 2nd tattoo, this time at Fishtown’s True Hand Society which is in a beautiful old church. I also broke down and finally got glasses so I can read after 5PM. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much better my mood is since wearing them.

Previous years
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011

Best Things This Year (2018)

What a year, huh?

I went as Axe Cop for Halloween

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 are underway.

Let’s review.

Adobe
Magento was acquired in June by Adobe for $1.68 billion. In 2013 I had 18 co-workers and now I have 18,000. Unfortunately, they decided to close the Philadelphia office. I decided not to move to Austin, so for the first time in 6 years I’ll be doing something else.

My friends over at Stitch were also acquired by Talend in November, so the RJMetrics venture feels complete.

Turned 40
I got a tattoo and learned to play the ukulele.

Glitch
Glitch feels like Codepen meets Geocities. I ported old projects there and created new ones. They even included two of my projects in their 2018 favorites list! Check out my profile.

take-a-walk.glitch.me

Observable
I caught a preview of this in 2017 when Mike Bostock demoed it at the OpenVisConf, but javascript’s answer to Jupyter Notebooks is out. I’ve used it for data journalism, artsy projects, and a good way to re-use code snippets.

Data Jawn
I did less public speaking in 2018, but I gave my best talk yet at Data Jawn 2018. I used open source data tools to measure Philadelphia’s negativity relative to other American cities.

Winning the Super Bowl temporarily boosted tweet sentiment in Philadelphia

Alberto Cairo
I went to see The Functional Art author’s talk, Visual Trumpery, at Bryn Mawr college.

Eraserhood Forever
I finally went to the Eraserhood Forever event at PhilaMoca and listened to the wonderful Sherilyn Fenn talk for an hour. Afterwards, I won a Lynch trivia contest!

Billy Penn
I worked on two data journalism projects with Danya Henninger. One was a sentiment analysis around whether Philadelphias preferred Wawa or Sheetz and another was a quest to find the most ridden Indego bike in Philadelphia, which eventually got the meme treatment from friends and coworkers.

Odyssey of the Mind
Sasha’s OM team won their regional tournament this year and competed against the top NJ teams at the state finals.

Dataviz
Visualizing the changes in my top 100 movies list 2009 – 2018 slopegraph
RJMetrics: Where are they Now? Sankey diagram
NLEast 2007: Whisker sparkline and bump chart

Music
Spotify generates year-end content for everyone and it said St Vincent was my favorite artist of 2018, but Jet Ski Accidents by The Blow was my most played song.

Shows
The Blow @ Johnny Brenda’s
St Vincent @ The Queen in Wilmington, DE
Liz Phair @ Union Transfer
Sweet Spirit @ Johnny Brenda’s
Memory Keepers @ Mohawk and Barracuda in Austin
Eraserhood Forever @ PhilaMoca
Beck and Jenny Lewis @ the Festival Pier

Travel
Austin (many times)
Seattle
Las Vegas
Antioch, IL
I visited NYC more time this year than ever before
Costa Rica!

Movies / TV
Mandy
Moonlihght
Annhiliation
Blade Runner 2049
Icarus
Thor: Ragnarok
The Incredibles 2
3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, MO
Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel
Your Name
Sharp Objects
The Good Place
Dark
The Wire (Season 3)
Barry

Books
La Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman
Creative Quest by Questlove
How Music Works by David Byrne
The Globlet of Fire by JK Rowling
The Giver by Lois Lowry
D3.js in Action by Elijah Meeks
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
Talk Like Ted by Carmine Gallo
Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Previous years
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011

Tufte Course Review and Notes

Yesterday I attended Ed Tufte’s one day course on Presenting Data and Information. His book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, completely changed the way I think about data. If you love his book, I highly recommend his course. He doesn’t cover a lot of new ground, but he puts emphasis on a few things I didn’t pick up on before.

Books by Ed Tufte
His 4 books came with the cost of the course

Key points:

  1. Show causality
  2. Don’t pre-specify the medium of the presentation. Use whatever it takes to show causality.
  3. Annotate linking lines.
  4. Be inspired by maps.
  5. Web design is too influenced by internal hierarchies and ends up being a turf war. Make the interface flat and filled with content.
  6. Your presentations should strive to be as data dense as the sports page.
  7. No zebra stripes in tables.
  8. Most interesting data is multivariate. Supergraphics like Minard’s Napoleon’s March show 6 or more variables.
  9. Progress in most fields is measured by information resolution and throughput. Why are our power point slides limited to 4 or 5 bullets?
  10. Put important analysis and comparison in a common eyespan (no flipping or scrolling)
  11. Be wary of focus groups. Good design is not a democracy.
  12. Start every software project with the interface.
  13. Make the data the interface.
  14. Instead of trickling in data during a presentation, dump a ton of data in their lap, have them read it, and have them cross examine you.

I got to talk to ET himself for a few minutes before the course started about his work on the stimulus bill. I mentioned some work I’ve been doing on making sparklines in HTML 5 and he said to make sure I paid attention to the length and width proportions. I got to meet a lot of interesting people and even convinced PMMI to send Jorge and Paula. So glad I went!