Beneath Data About Me
I am an engineer and programmer by trade. I'll do just about anything on two wheels. I'm an occasional writer and a halfway decent sailor, too. I have backed my way into programming to a certain degree, but in 2012 I pushed myself into Python full-time and haven't looked back. I am curious about the world around me and find my natural bent is digging deep into data sets trying to find the underlying signals and patterns. Hence the blog name.
About this website
I created this blog for a dual purpose - to give me a platform to share the worthwhile bits of data I come across, and to help others dive into similar projects themselves. It's tremendously fun to get your hands into a complex dataset and look for patterns. But too often the bulk of my time is spent just familiarizing myself with the environment or learning rookie mistakes the hard way. Sometimes though, a Google search turns up just the right blog post and suddenly, you can learn from someone else's mistakes and find the basic code to cover the steepest portion of the learning curve. I hope Beneath Data can show at least a couple people the way.
The mindset of approaching complex questions with an analytical, statistical mind is happily becoming more commonplace. The rise in popularity of websites like FiveThirtyEight imply that people are less willing to rely on anecdotal evidence to support a claim and will go looking for the thoughtful, data-driven analysis. I hope that this blog can help fill that growing need and, in its own way, continue the trend.