Blog Rants & ramblings
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January 29, 2023
Twelve software projects and companies I use all the time as a working data journalist.
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January 22, 2023
A one-liner to tell you how much space all of your
node_modules
are taking up across your codebases - I've got gigabytes. -
January 21, 2023
For the last 8 years I have been a nearly daily user of Node but Deno seems really neat and I want to use it more this year.
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January 16, 2023
If you're exploring or publishing data, you should give this open source tool a go.
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January 03, 2023
I used ImageMagick and a a daily image published by NOAA to look at 2022's soil moisture.
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January 02, 2023
Yup. And with Github Actions and Datasette we can keep an eye on them.
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December 18, 2022
Javascript Promises make it easy to add retry behavior to web scrapers so they crash less
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December 04, 2022
Can we have better California legislative hearing transcripts thanks to some free AI tools?
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November 28, 2022
Using open source Python and Javascript tools to extract data out of raster images and into GeoJSON files
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April 06, 2022
A frequently updated JSON file of all of the Board of Parole Hearings' suitability hearing results.
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October 21, 2021
Trying to understand the data fields in a California STD 73 form? This one's for you. And me.
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December 21, 2020
It isn't hard to configure, but I spent more than 15 minutes searching and fiddling so here is the blog post I wish I had come across.
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September 17, 2020
Announcing a public, updated database of municipal campaign finance filings from across California
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April 17, 2020
Sometimes, reliving your memories is only a map or two away.
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February 15, 2020
A short rant about Democratic delegates and a calculator tool to go along with it.
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May 22, 2018
The subways here in NYC, run by the MTA, are routinely and rightly criticized for their lack of ADA compliance and accessibility. The system does have some, though nowhere near enough, elevators which...
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January 24, 2018
I went searching for the Trump statement calling for a “complete and total shutdown” of Muslim immigration to America the other day and I was a bit dismayed by what I found. It certainly is not hard t...
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November 29, 2017
Scraping web pages is a messy, error prone, and brittle method to go about getting some data of the internet, but sometimes it is all you have. I have written a few scrapers and have always wondered w...
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March 02, 2015
I don't mean a bad word as in we should say it in hushed tones around children. I mean it is truly a poorly interpreted and even more poorly used word. It is emotional. It is evocative. It has become...
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December 02, 2014
Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself in a frustrating situation: 30,000 feet above the ground in a comfortable window seat, attempting to do some D3 visualizations of data returned by an HTTP API...