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.

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 journalismartsy 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

5K Results Reimagined

Haddon Township 5K Turkey Trot 2009 Race Results
Haddon Township 5K Turkey Trot 2009 Race Results

This graph shows and is sorted by the relative times for each runner on the left, their relative age on the right, and their gender by color. It seems to show that on average, men ran the race faster than women.

This graph below is the same data, but sorted by the participants’ age.

Race results sorted by age
Race results sorted by age

Image 2 shows the distribution of racers with a sharp increase about 1/4 of the way up. ? ?I think the 1 year old is a typo. ?haha. ?It also shows a big cluster of 12-14 year old girls. ?I couldn’t figure out a way to show what town they were from, but that would be interesting to analyze, too. Big thanks to Sparklines for Excel for the AddIn that helped me make these images.

Update: ?I fixed the problems I had with the previous images. ?These should reflect the actual data.

Owen Ryker Garvey

I’m a dad. Again!

Owen Ryker Garvey was born on September 18th, 2009 at 2:39PM. He was 7lbs, 12oz, 20″ long, and a great addition to our family.

Isn't he cute?
Isn't he cute?

He’s named after a character in the John Irving novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. It’s Jeanne’s favorite book and I liked it a lot as well. I definitely liked the name. We sweated the middle name for months and finally settled on Ryker. Some other candidates were Issac and Elias. I hope he likes it!

Naming someone is freaking hard. My wife says I overthink it, but sometimes I feel like giving someone a name is like letting someone else pick our your tattoo. He’s the one who has to live with it for the rest of his life. What’s in a name? Sure you can say that, but I think we all have been influenced by someone’s interesting, odd, or boring name.

Jeanne and Owen are both doing great and we’re settling in at home. So far Sasha has been great with him. I’m headed back to work tomorrow.

People always say the day their kids are born is the greatest day of their lives. I think they are insane or kidding themselves. Even if everything goes 100% well, it’s an immensely stressful and uncomfortable day. For me the best day is when we’re all home and everyone is doing great. Like today.