Projects

Civic Data Work

Before I had young kids, I built a number of open source visualization tools to help people better understand government data - focusing on Campaign Finance data and Federal Budget data.

US Budget is an interactive visualization of the US budget using d3.js. This was a really cool project, and led me to connect with the team at USA Spending who built an official government version inspired by this project.

Explore Campaign Finance interactive visualization of federal campaign finance data.

Winning Congress is an interactive visualization on how much money was raised by members of congress across election cycles.

Benford Analysis of the US Budget looks at US budget numbers over 35 years to and compares them to what we would have expected from a benford distribution.

OpenSecrets Data To Postgres is a project to clean and import into postgres all the campaign finance data released by opensecrets.

Data History

There was a time before Pandas and Jupyter notebooks where Python hadn’t yet won the war to become the programming language for data. Back in these early days of Data Science, people would develop data tools in whichever language the rest of their organizations used at the time.

For me, in 2010, that was Ruby. So, I built a lot of assorted utility functions and tools to help use data more effectively with Ruby. A few got open sourced below.

BI is a lightweight business intelligence application with four primary functions: Daily KPI calculation & display, ad-hoc querying, advanced reporting, and custom visualization. For a quick intro to the project, see this talk.

It’s interesting to see how this space evolved over time. The modern data stack has certainly matured, and there are a lot of great advancements across data ingestion, data warehousing and data modeling.

That said, there are still some elements of this application that are gaps in the modern analytics stack, particularly the internal tool creation functionality.

Replica Connect is a ruby gem to make it easy to connect to a database from a plain old ruby file.

PgToCsv is a ruby gem to make it easy to create csv files form ruby query result hashes.

Random Sites

Like most people, I have some assorted random things on the internet from over the years.

Memoir Place is a site to help people write their memoirs.

Awesome Quote is a site for awesome famous quotes.

Eli Message is a site I built so people could send nice messages to my wife on our wedding day.

Notes

Most of these projects are still up, but they are not actively maintained.