I Waited 9 Years to Write This: On The Death of a Friend

Thank you to the McCausland family for reviewing this post before it was published. On February 1st, 2014, in the early hours of the morning, my friend Sarah McCausland was struck and killed by a drunk driver. She was walking back to campus with her friends near Bard College. She had only recently turned 19. […]

2023 Book Reviews: Striving to Read and Remember More

Vorleserin (“His Reader), Carl Riedel (1864) The Conceit As I’ve delved deeper into the world of data science, machine learning, and math, the time I’ve spent reading has dwindled. While I don’t expect that I will magically gain more time this year, I hope that by reviewing books after reading them, I’ll be inspired to […]

2022: My Year In Review

What Did I Do This Year? As 2022 winds down, I’ve found myself looking back and wondering: what did I do that matters to me? In many ways, it was a blur. Being a founding member of a seed-stage startup will do that to you, not to mention moving to a new state and all […]

Legacy Naming Conventions Are Holding Us Back

Introduction Let’s see if this sounds familiar: It’s your first day at Finch—an e-commerce startup that sells bird food and supplies. As you’re onboarded you’re gradually introduced to the company’s internal services. First there’s Macaw, a wrapper around Airflow DAGs; then there’s Senegal, which leverages Terraform; of course, you’ll need Falcon which ingests avro files […]

Pandas Functions: Advanced Groupbys with Grouper, Assign, and Query

Introduction Pandas groupbys are some of the most useful functions in a data scientist’s toolkit. And yet, time and again I have found that colleagues do not realize the flexibility these ubiquitous functions can grant them. In the following post, I will demonstrate some of my favorite uses of groupbys in the hope that it […]