Work Projects & pieces
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Lobbying in Sacramento
Why California cities use your tax dollars to lobby the Legislature (8/3/2023)
Oil companies top big year in lobbyist spending (11/9/2023)
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Financial disclosure data for California legislators
How free trips for California legislators lead to bills (5/4/2023)
This law should reveal who’s paying for California legislators’ travel. It’s only been used twice (5/18/2023)
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Redistricting maps for CalMatters
I worked with reporter Sameea Kamal to create a series of maps that were used to illustrate one of the most confusing topics in American elections: redistricting.
We used animated maps to show change over time and chose focal areas that were both relevant to the story and had particularly interesting changes.
How will diverse voters be represented in California’s new election districts? (10/14/2021)
Where are the flashpoints in California redistricting? (11/10/2021)
California redistricting: Which incumbents are in tough spots? (11/18/2021)
California redistricting: What to know about the final maps (12/21/2021)
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Interactives about homelessness in California
Could this COVID program help reduce the California housing crisis? (8/8/2021)
California homeless population grew by 22,000 over pandemic (10/6/2021)
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Follow the money: Gavin Newsom recall edition
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California’s budget whiplash: From a record-setting surplus to a massive shortfall in one year
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How big is California’s historic budget, visualized
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Inmate shuffle: How California bounces around its mentally ill prisoners
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Force multipliers: How one donor network is pushing the envelope on California campaign money
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Custom maps and geospatial analysis
How we analyzed why millions of California students lack broadband access (4/28/2021)
A quiet crisis: Tenants fall through the safety net into an eviction cluster in Long Beach (8/2/2021)
California poised to restrict bee-killing pesticides (7/20/2022)
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Look up your new California election districts for 2022
I created a tool that uses any address in California to show how the districts changed after redistricting. Using the shapefiles provided by the state's independent redistricting commission, I used open-source geospatial tools to find the overlapping parts of each district.
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I was a graphics editor for covidtracking.com and created tools that let the managing editors easily create daily visualizations that were shared on Twitter (like this one and this one), developed a visualization guide as a reference implementation.
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Road to 270: Choose potential paths to a White House victory
The Electoral College is an important but complicated part of our democracy. I led development of an interactive tool designed to allow readers to see various scenarios, and create their own, of how the race to win 270 votes in the College might shape up in November 2020.
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Campaign finance analysis for NBC News
I worked with the political reporters at NBC News to analyze FEC data to find trends and specific patterns. I wrote programs to allow us to look through large FEC datasets on a quick deadline and created graphics to accompany the stories.
Hedging their bets: Some Democratic donors back more than one 2020 contender (4/17/2019)
Kamala Harris blows past Democratic rivals in fundraising in communities of color (5/8/2019)
Bernie Sanders raised more online from Iowans than rest of Dem field (2/3/2020)
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NBC News election results in 2018, 2019, and 2020
I was the technical leader for the real time election night results on NBCNews.com for the 2018 midterms, a few elections in 2019, and the the first few primaries in 2020. The application we built served election results to over 20 million page views over the course of my time at NBC News.
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Election Confessions is an interactive application that allows anybody to submit a "confession" during the course of the 2020 presidential campaign and allows other readers to get a sneak-peak into the minds of their fellow voters.
I was the principal technical architect of the application, designing a system that recognized our organization constraints (such as not having a production-ready database) to create a data pipeline that enabled readers to submit a confession, an editor to moderate the content, and then a website for the public to read and sort the confessions.
The project won a Webby Award in 2020.
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High definition maps of partisan redistricting in North Carolina
I created the two high definition maps that clearly illustrate the partisan redistricting that has been occuring in North Carolina for the last decade, if not longer. I developed tools to analyze and the large data set and designed the maps that show where each registered voter with a partisan affiliation lives in the Western part of the state.
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California's wildfires are as big as 17 Manhattans
In November 2018, historic wildfires ravaged California and the scale was hard to communicate. So, we designed and built an interactive map that helped readers get a sense of the scale of the fires by placing them on top of a more familiar place. Though the graphic was simple, it was very effective and widely shared.
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What is 'Medicare for All' and how would it work?
We published a piece on the basics of "Medicare for All" as the 2020 primary debate season started that helped readers understand the various stances the major candidates were taking on the health care policy. I designed and developed the graphics for the piece as well as an interactive tool which allowed the candidates to be sorted by their position.
The graphic I built was used in a few other pieces that form a series explaining the positions of the 2020 Democratic candidates for president.
What is the 'Green New Deal,' and how would it work?
The student debt crisis and what Democratic candidates propose doing about it
What are the Democratic proposals on guns and what do critics say?
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More experimental approaches to story telling
How long people in your city are expected to live (4/14/2019)
We used an analysis of life expectancy at the Census tract level and built a "scrollytelling" piece that allows readers to get a sense of how life expectancy varies across the country as well as zoom into their city and compare neighborhoods they are more familiar with.
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Journey to power: The history of black voters, 1976 to 2020
I designed and developed the data graphics for this nine part piece by Steve Kornacki. It is a look at how the importance of black voters has grown within the Democratic party by looking at each contested presidential primary since 1976.
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Mapping control of the US House in the 2018 midterms
One of the central questions in the 2018 federal midterm elections was who would win a majority in each chamber in Congress. I designed and developed a graphic to highlight some of the more contested races and allow readers to explore their own ideas about how each party might end up with control of the U.S. House.
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The MTA (which runs the NYC subway, among other things) publishes elevator outage data to a website but doesn't provide much for folks looking to do analysis. It has no historical data available and does not provide users with a list of outages that have been resolved.
I wrote a scraper that keeps track of all the published elevator outages in the MTA system and adds a notion of when the elevator returned to service. In addition to getting the data, all known outages are published as a CSV once a day and a friendly bot tweets out when there is a new outage.
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The Crime Data Explorer makes nationwide crime data accessible to a wide range of users. View trends, download bulk datasets, and access the Crime Data API for reported crime at the national, state, and agency levels.
I was the technical lead on the project and was responsible for ensuring high test coverage across the React codebase, automated deployments, advocating for the use of Service Workers and server side rendering to improve end user performance. I was also responsible for managing all of our releases.
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An infrequently updated collection of posts about eating bagels across New York City. As far as I am aware, this is also the only public bagel API.
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A plugin for websites made with Jekyll that makes it easy to use the Service Worker API and enable offline access to the content.
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Civic Quarterly was a print and digital publication about transforming government with digital tools & design thinking. We made three beautiful issues before we decided to call it quits.
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I provided guidance for the City of Chattanooga's open data policy as a Code for America fellow. It was a part of a larger open data effort led by the local government and the Open Chattanooga brigade.
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An easy to use, HTTP proxy-and-cache for web development in situations where connectivity can be a bit spotty.
