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.

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

15 things I’m doing after OpenVisConf 2017

Today was the last day of the incredible OpenVisConf in Boston. I’m still digesting everything from the two days of talks, but here is my general plan.

1. Taking screenshots of my work in progress. So many of the talks had in-progress shots that showed their design and thought process and it made everything easier to follow.

2. Do more medium sized dataviz projects. I might not be able to crank out one every month, but I should do more smaller viz projects like I used to.

3. Turn my network graphs into scatterplots

4. Do at least one map project this year

5. Figure out what REGL is before the author is killed by a volcano

6. Try out WTFCSV

7. Build a particle viz for support tickets with Trello data.

8. Do more of those “draw the chart” tests that the New York Times puts out.

9. Use simulation.find() in D3!

10. Learn more about veroni

11. Do some text data mining on Shakespeare using tidytext

12. Put chart colors/styles in our styleguide

13. See if I can use Vega-Lite to generate all possible chart types at once for a data set, such as automobile deaths.

14. Make some generative art based on http://bengarvey.com/bounce/gravity.html

15. Build some color palettes using Colorgorical

BONUS 16. Hope I get into the d3.express beta

Spoil Your Meetings

You just got a calendar invite your boss. 

What’s going on? Are you getting fired? Your last performance review was fine! 

You walk to your boss’s office. HR is sitting there with her.

Kermit being nervous

Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap.

HR walks out as you walk in. You sit down, and your boss says, “Hey I just wanted to bounce an idea off of you.

Breathe.

Meetings shouldn’t have surprises. Spoil them.

Tell everyone what you’re going to say before you go. Give away the ending. Put all the good parts in trailer. And the bad parts. And the song that’s going to play in the montage while your team builds the A-Team-esque vehicle that is needed to do the job. 

If your meeting doesn’t have spoilers, then it’s probably not worth having.

Real Work

I want to talk about real work and fake work.

Does this sound like your work culture?
Does this sound like your work culture?

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 lists? Are you patting yourself on the back for reaching Inbox Zero?

How many times today did a customer notice something you did?

Sam Altman writes about fake work for startup founders:

In general, startups get distracted by fake work. Fake work is both easier and more fun than real work for many founders. Two particularly bad cases are raising money and getting personal press; we’ve seen many promising founders fall in love with one or (usually) both of these, which nearly always ends badly. But the list of fake work is long.

I tell founders to consider how directly a task relates to growing. Obviously, building and selling are the best. Things like hiring are also very high on the list—you will need to hire to sustain your growth rate at some point. Interviewing lots of lawyers has got to be near the bottom.

So now we have rules for founders/CEO’s:
Real work: Building/Coding and sales, probably hiring.
Fake work: Interviewing lots of lawyers.

Does Sam think lawyers are unnecessary? No, but he realizes picking the 1st or 2nd best lawyer is indistinguishable from choosing the 12th best when it comes to your business. Finding the best employees is a better use of a CEO’s time.

But what about everyone else? How do we distinguish between real work and fake work?

Toyota’s legendary production system strives to eliminate waste everywhere. When talking about waste, Toyota’s Shigeo Shingo observed that only the last turn of a bolt tightens it.

"Only the last turn of a bolt tightens it" - Shigeo Singo
“Only the last turn of a bolt tightens it” – Shigeo Singo

That final turn in software engineering is shipping code. There are other activities so closely tied to deploying code that they are undoubtedly Real Work, such as programming and reviewing another engineer’s code. What about everything else?

I define Real Work as
A. Work that creates an immediate and positive change in your product/service
B. Work that is a direct constraint to the completion of A
C. Work you have been uniquely hired to do.

Type C has to be included because many jobs don’t touch A and B, but someone has to do them. Google famously hired a masseuse, Bonnie Brown, when they had only 40 employees. Was she improving our search results in 1999? Maybe not, but Larry and Sergei thought it was critical to their success. For Bonnie, she should be confident that shipping each great massage (type C) was Real Work as it had been identified by the business as type B work.

So why make the distinction between A, B, and C at all? Why not just say Real Work is what you were hired to do and leave the question of whether it’s valuable or not to the person who hired you. It’s because most of our jobs have a degree of autonomy in the the tasks we take on. We should prioritize type A tasks and have a high standard for B tasks. We should eliminate any B tasks that don’t enhance our ability to complete A tasks. Fake work is anything that doesn’t live up to that standard.

Things you can do tomorrow to minimize Fake Work
1. Skip a meeting you don’t need to attend
2. Turn your weekly meeting into a bi-weekly meeting, or even monthly
3. Be concise in communications. Be polite, but formality in email is dead.
4. Don’t jump into conversations just because you can. Comments can be useful, but they also add cognitive load to an issue.
5. Eliminate, automate, or delegate menial tasks.
6. “Table it!” Brian Sloane introduced this to me. If two people are having a drawn out discussion in a meeting, put your hand on the table (or in the air) and say “Table it” to indicate that this discussion should continue in another channel at a later time.

Things you can do tomorrow to maximize Real Work
1. Figure out what real work means for you in your job.
2. Schedule time specific tasks. Treat them like appointments.
3. Don’t check your email until you’ve been at work for an hour. This is an old Tim Ferris trick. If you’re feeling brave, forego Slack, too.
4. Observe the habits of people who get things done. Shamelessly steal them.

Minimizing fake work doesn’t mean you should eat lunch at your desk everyday. The advantage of focusing on Real Work is so you can perform at a high level and still live your life.

New Job

Garvey Corporation was started long ago as a gas station in 1926 by an Irish immigrant named Gordon Garvey. He chose a location on Route 73 directly between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, since it would be an ideal place for people to stop for gas coming from either direction. The company moved away from being a service station over the years and evetually got into making sheet metal parts. By the 50’s and 60’s, Gordon’s sons Fran and Bud took over the company and developed their own line of modular conveyor systems to sell to the local glass making industry. In 1980, Mark and Bill Garvey, sons of Bud and Fran, took the helm of the company and expanded its reach into more extensive and complex product handling systems with customers all over the world.

As of last week, I’m the new General Manager.

Infinity Rx

It’s a role I never would have expected to come this soon if at all. It’s nerve racking and exhilarating at the same time and an immense test on my abilities. I like the work I have been doing far more than I ever thought I would and that helps. Wish me luck, as I am responsible for the livelyhood of 80 people and their families. I take that 100% seriously and think about it every day.

Not that I don’t have help! We have a great group, including my brother Jake.

If you’re curious about what we do, check it out: http://www.garvey.com

Also, here’s a case study I wrote for a wine magazine about what our equipment did for Rodney Strong Vineyards.

What I do

I don’t make too many work posts, but here is a quick explanation of what I do every day. I’m the Engineering manager for Garvey Corporation, a company started in 1926 by my great grandfather, Gordon Garvey. We make product handling equipment for high speed packagers in the food, beverage, pharmaceutical, and consumer products industries. Mainly that means conveyors, accumulators, loaders, unloaders, inspection stations, etc. Our customers are mostly big food companies like Kraft, General Mills; goods producers like Proctor and Gamble; beverage makers like Ocean Spray; and pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Wyeth. We also do a ton of work in the wine industry for Rodney Strong, Don Sebastiani, Mondavi, etc. which was spurred on by my Dad’s work in creating a new type of buffering system to accumulate wine bottles between the filling and labeling machines. We called this new accumulator the Garvey Infinity and have sold hundreds of them since 2001.

The reason for this post is that we’ve come up with a breakthrough accumulation machine for the pharmaceutical industry that I’ve been working on for months. It’s finally finished and it turned out even better than I hoped. It applies all the lessons we learned in the beverage industry and focuses them on super tiny pharmaceutical bottles, sometimes as small as 15mm wide.

Here’s a video of the Infinity Rx accumulating and single filing 2ml 15mm vials at over 850 vials per minute. It’s for a show, so that’s why it loops back into itself.