Blog Rants & ramblings

• Taking stock of my "data tool belt"

  January 29, 2023

  Twelve software projects and companies I use all the time as a working data journalist.

• Heavyweight dependencies

  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.

• Deno by default in 2023?

  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.

• Datasette is my data hammer

  January 16, 2023

  If you're exploring or publishing data, you should give this open source tool a go.

• How to turn a directory full of images into an animated GIF

  January 03, 2023

  I used ImageMagick and a a daily image published by NOAA to look at 2022's soil moisture.

• Are companies talking about their California campaign cash on earnings calls with investors?

  January 02, 2023

  Yup. And with Github Actions and Datasette we can keep an eye on them.

• Promises for more stability

  December 18, 2022

  Javascript Promises make it easy to add retry behavior to web scrapers so they crash less

• Senators, subtitles, and speech to text AI

  December 04, 2022

  Can we have better California legislative hearing transcripts thanks to some free AI tools?

• Extracting California fuel moisture data from Forest Service rasters

  November 28, 2022

  Using open source Python and Javascript tools to extract data out of raster images and into GeoJSON files

• Prison parole hearing results as a dataset

  April 06, 2022

  A frequently updated JSON file of all of the Board of Parole Hearings' suitability hearing results.

• California record retention schedule data dictionary

  October 21, 2021

  Trying to understand the data fields in a California STD 73 form? This one's for you. And me.

• Configuring Datasette timeout options on Heroku

  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.

• The California municipal campaign finance project

  September 17, 2020

  Announcing a public, updated database of municipal campaign finance filings from across California

• Is Citibike a Pensieve?

  April 17, 2020

  Sometimes, reliving your memories is only a map or two away.

• Dizzying Democratic delegate... math

  February 15, 2020

  A short rant about Democratic delegates and a calculator tool to go along with it.

• How long will that subway elevator be out of service?

  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...

• A daydream about citations in news articles

  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...

• Scraping Gothamist articles with Docker and Javascript

  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...

• "Terrorist" is a bad word.

  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...

• Airplane mode

  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...