All posts by Ari Lamstein

Reader Questions about Analytics Engineering

Last week I announced a new focus for my blog: codifying my thoughts around the new role of Analytics Engineering. The post led to some interesting exchanges with longtime readers. I thought that two of these questions, along with my responses, might interest a wider audience, so I am copying them here. Q1: How does […]

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Something New: Analytics Engineering

I started this blog in 2015 to serve as reference material for Choroplethr, my open source R package for mapping demographic statistics. A lot has changed since then, and I’ve decided to start using this space for something else: to codify my thoughts on the new field of Analytics Engineering. As a software engineer, there […]

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Exploring the Demographics of US Congressional Districts in R

I recently created a few datasets to facilitate analyzing the interaction between demographics and political party affiliations of US Congressional Districts. My goal was to create this graph: I added this data to Choroplethr and pushed the new version to CRAN. This post walks you through using these datasets, the analysis I did, and the […]

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Choroplethr v3.6.4 is now on CRAN (and the Future of Choroplethr)

Choroplethr v3.6.4 is now on CRAN. This is the first update to the package in two years, and was necessary because of a recent change to the tigris package, which choroplethr uses to make Census Tract maps. I also took this opportunity to add new example demographic data for Census Tracts. Quick Demo The first […]

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Using Python to Cheat at Scrabble

My New Year’s Resolution was to learn Python. After taking a few online courses, I became comfortable enough with the language to tackle a small side project. Side projects are great for learning a language because they let you “own” a project from start to finish as well as solve a problem that is of […]

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