About

Often I find myself looking for an excuse to learn something new. Whether is flask, D3, SQL or statistics, this blog is my scapegoat. “Oh sure”, I say, “I will have another blog post out soon.” But really posting isn’t the goal.

My first post, Honesty in Politics, was compiled using a programing language called BYOND. For the majority of you who haven’t heard about it, it is a fun little language with the main goal of creating online multiplayer games. I started with that language back in 2003 and completed a total of one game before I started getting more interested in using it to prototype non-gaming ideas. Realizing that I could bend this language to do more than it was built for, (but not realizing there were better solutions for this), I decided to take a stab at building a web scraper. It was a mess, building html parsing from scratch, but it worked.

The next post, What Happened with Lego, led me to dive head first into Python. Python opened up a world of possibilities that I didn’t know existed–there were libraries built specifically for everything I never knew I wanted. My process changed from manually combing through lengthy csv filed to doing quick pivot tables in excel to currently using SQLite and Pandas to make sense of the seemingly endless flow of data from my scrapers.

This leads me to now. I have a long list of posts I would love to have up on this site, but I find myself endlessly distracted by technology. Recently I have been digging into D3 and I hope the hours I have spent learning how to make svg charts will bear fruit in a post in the future. But that’s not really the point is it?

This isn’t so much a blog, but rather the result of questioning. It isn’t an obligation to spread information but rather a reason to try something new.

If you are feeling particularly generous, feel free to send me a tip on Venmo to keep the servers running.