New Project: hometown_analysis

Over the weekend I started a new project: an analysis of how my hometown has changed over time. I am calling the project hometown_analysis and the github repo for it is here. If this project interests you then I encourage you to star and watch the repo.

I developed the idea for this project while visiting my hometown several months ago. When speaking to friends and family who still live there they kept on saying that the town had changed dramatically since I was a child. I thought it would be fun to see if any of those changes are visible in Census data.

Longtime users of Census data will immediately realize that there are some problems with a project like this. Yesterday I worked through one (choosing a geography). This morning I worked through another (verifying that the borders of that geography have been stable over time). I also checked in a “todo” file to list other issues that will have to be addressed.

This is now my second project using Python (the first was the Covid Demographics Explorer, which has some similarities to this project). It is interesting to see how my workflow has changed to make better use of the Python ecosystem. For example, for this project I have started creating one Jupyter Notebook for each milestone. This was not a conscious thought: it just seemed natural. And it similarly seemed natural to check those notebooks into github, which I had not done before. I am also now using uv to manage project dependencies and black to format my code.

As I mention in the project’s README, my approach to this project is two-fold: I hope to solve the specific problem that I have defined. But I also hope to do it in such a way that it allows others to solve similar problems. This is very similar to the approach I took when developing choroplethr.

If this project interests you then I encourage you to “watch” and “star” the repo on github: hometown_analysis.

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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