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 […]
Building a Census Explorer in Python: Part 1
One of my career goals is to get as fluent with Python as I am with R. Since I don’t use Python at work, my efforts so far have focused on online courses and weekly exercise services. Courses came first (you need to learn the fundamentals somehow, after all). Then came weekly exercises (that’s where […]