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 to me because it was my first project in Python. After a decade of programming almost exclusively in R, last year I accepted that Python is becoming the de facto language for data analysis and set a goal of knowing it as well as I know R. I’m not there yet, but I do view this project as a milestone on that journey.

Because it was my first Python project, I have a lot of people to thank:

  • James Abel (co-organizer of the SF Python Meetup) helped me find an angle to the project that would interest this group.
  • All the folks who work in Developer Relations at Streamlit. They created lots of training materials, a welcoming community, meetups and were generally very helpful.
  • Kyle Walker, who has created popular R packages for working with Census data, pointed me towards the censusdis package when I first mentioned the idea of doing a Census-related project in Python.
  • Darren Vengroff for both creating the censusdis package and answering all my questions during development.
  • Ramnath Vaidyanathan for providing some code reviews early on, and advice on how to architect the app.
  • Reuven Lerner for creating courses on introductory Python and Pandas. Those courses wound up being a prerequisite for this project.
Ari Lamstein

Ari Lamstein

I’m a software engineer who focuses on data projects.

I most recently worked as a Staff Data Science Engineer at a marketing analytics consultancy. While there I developed internal tools for our data scientists, ran workshops on data science and mentored data scientists on software engineering.

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