New Project: “Data Engineering with Databricks” Course
This week I embark on an exciting new project: taking Databricks’ official “Data Engineering with Databricks” course! At the start of this project I find myself wanting to connect with people who have...
View ArticleRecording of my talk at the SF Python Meetup
The recording of my June talk at the SF Python Meetup (“A Streamlit App to Explore how America Changed During Covid”) is now online! I hope that you take a few minutes to watch the talk, play with the...
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Why I’m Switching to Polars
I recently decided to switch from Pandas to Polars for my Python projects that use dataframes. I came to this decision while taking a workshop on Polars last week: I found its syntax to be so intuitive...
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How Much Python Do Data Scientists Need To Know?
A few months ago I wrote a blog post about Polars, a new dataframe library in Python that is both incredibly fast and easy to use. While the post was well-received, I did get some push-back on it. The...
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A Guide to Contributing to Open Source Python Packages
I recently made my first contribution to an established Python package (link). When I shared this milestone with friends I realized that many of them are interested in doing something similar but don’t...
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New Project: hometown_analysis
Over the weekend I started a new project: an analysis of how my hometown has changed over time. I am calling the project hometown_analysis and the github repo for it is here. If this project interests...
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New Python Functions for Working with Multi-Year ACS Data
As part of my hometown_analysis project I’ve written some new functions for working with multi-year data from the American Community Survey (ACS). The functions are download_multiyear, graph_multiyear...
View ArticleChoroplethr is Scheduled to be Archived from CRAN
I was just notified by CRAN that choroplethr is scheduled to be archived on February 12. The reason is that choroplethr depends on the acs package, and the acs package is being archived. Apparently...
View ArticleIs CRAN Holding R Back?
Today the R package acs was “archived” from CRAN. This led to the choroplethr package (which I maintain) also being “archived”. I write “archived” in quotes because CRAN stands for “Comprehensive R...
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New Parameter to `download_multiyear`
In a previous post I demonstrated how to use three Python functions I wrote to work with multi-year data from the American Community Survey (ACS): download_multiyear, graph_multiyear and...
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Using Python to Measure Immigration Trends
I recently finished a project that uses Python and the American Community Survey (ACS) to measure immigration in the town I grew up in. This post provides an overview of the results. If you are...
View Articlecensusdis v1.4.0 is now on PyPI
I recently contributed a new module to the censusdis package. This resulted in a new version of the package being pushed to PyPI. You can install it like this: $ pip install censusdis -U #Verify that...
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Choroplethr v4.0.0 is now on CRAN
choroplethr version 4.0.0 is now on CRAN. You can install it like this: install.packages("choroplethr") packageVersion("choroplethr") # [1] ‘4.0.0’ With this version, I have transferred the maintenance...
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Course Review: Build an AI chatbot with Python
For a while now I’ve been wanting to learn more about LLMs. The problem has been that I wasn’t sure where to start. So when Kevin Markham launched his course Build an AI chatbot with Python I jumped at...
View ArticleCourse Review: Build AI Agents with Python
I was slow to jump on the LLM bandwagon. In some ways this is surprising. Although it was a while ago, I did take several AI courses in grad school. So I am probably in a good position to dive into new...
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New Release: Covid Demographics Explorer v2
I recently published a new version of my Covid Demographics Explorer app. I encourage you to try it out! This version adds data from the 2023 American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year estimates, and has...
View ArticleVideo: Covid Demographics Explorer v2
I just put together a video walkthrough of my latest blog post. Since the post was pretty detailed and technical, I thought a video could make the content more accessible. I’d love for you to check it...
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