censusdis v1.4.0 is now on PyPI

I recently contributed a new module to the censusdis package. This resulted in a new version of the package being pushed to PyPI. You can install it like this: The module I created is called multiyear. It is very similar to the utils module I created for my hometown_analysis project. This notebook demonstrates how to […]

Using Python to Measure Immigration Trends

I recently finished a project that uses Python and the American Community Survey (ACS) to measure immigration in the town I grew up in. This post provides an overview of the results. If you are interested in doing a similar analysis, I recommend using the code I used for this project as a starting point. […]

A Guide to Contributing to Open Source Python Packages

I recently made my first contribution to an established Python package (link). When I shared this milestone with friends I realized that many of them are interested in doing something similar but don’t know how. I decided to write down the steps I took in case it helps others. Step 1: Identify Packages You Want […]

How Much Python Do Data Scientists Need To Know?

A few months ago I wrote a blog post about Polars, a new dataframe library in Python that is both incredibly fast and easy to use. While the post was well-received, I did get some push-back on it. The criticism normally looked like this: Even if everything you say about Polars is true, you still […]

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 […]