General I spent November 2022 living in Poblado, the gringo/expat/tourist/rich local neighborhood of Medellín. In my time there, I ate a lot of food, did a lot of dancing, and spent at least a bit of time exploring the city. Upon letting my friends know that I’d be spending time in…

How To Effectively Work With Me — Introduction I wrote this post after spending hours reflecting on, analyzing, and discussing communication strategies that I have seen other people use with me and which I have found to work well for them. …

A tale of improbable functionality in Python — I recently had a funny experience that turned out to be a great education in the mutability of objects, especially strings, in Python. The experience came as a result of messing up on two Python brainteasers, getting annoyed about a seeming contradiction in the language functionality, and then going down…

From Radical Self-Reliance to Communal Effort — Last year, we birthed something beautiful. This year, it’s time to help our baby grow up. Holon Village, a Renegade Burning Man camp organized with the intent of getting more people to experience the magic of Burning Man, is going to be returning to the Playa twice this summer: once…

Making co-created experiences at Burning Man accessible — We have a once-a-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build something amazing together. This labor day weekend, for the first time in decades, tens of thousands of people will gather at Black Rock Desert without a sanctioned Burning Man event occurring. There will be art cars but no Department of Mutant Vehicles (DMV)…

An ephemeral intentional community outside of Taos, NM — Seventeen people. Three months. A property in the middle of nowhere. And a vision of testing what organizing a co-living space would be like, without the need to commit to buying a property or even signing a lease. What started as a vague idea to rent a small cabin close…

Are you building a data-driven web application that needs to serve data to your users with low latencies? Are you using MySQL, Postgres, or another traditional RDBMS as the backend for that web application? If so, you’re inevitably going to run into scalability issues as your dataset expands and your…

The importance of great data visualization — All too often, outsiders think that the job of data analysts and scientists is just number-crunching. Those of us who have actually practiced the science and art of extracting insights from data know that the job is at least as creative as it is analytical. The role of the data…

These three data viz pitfalls, which have proliferated during the pandemic, are instructive for data designers and consumers alike — To paraphrase a popular idiom: there are lies, damn lies, and data visualizations. This saying holds especially true in times of high pressure, such as in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In these uncertain times, rational people turn to data to help inform their opinions and decisions. Unfortunately…