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 that I couldn’t justify continuing to try to get “better” at Pandas, despite Pandas being the more established […]

Recording 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 app, and provide feedback. While I didn’t mention it in my talk, this project was important […]

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 already taken this course. I am particularly interested to know how much effort the course took and how well it prepared you […]

Upcoming Talk at SF Python Meetup

I am delighted to announce that tomorrow (June 12) I will be speaking at the SF Python Meetup about my Covid-19 Demographics Explorer app. This talk is quite exciting for me as it will be my first talk about a Python project I have done. (After a decade of programming in R, this feels like […]

Creating Time Series Data from the American Community Survey (ACS)

One of the most important decisions in my Covid Demographics Explorer app was how to communicate the demographic changes that occurred between 2019 and 2021. I started by computing the raw population changes and saw that San Francisco County’s population went down 66,348. But that number, by itself, is hard to reason about. You really […]