Working in Analytics

As a Software Product Analyst working in Data Science, and someone that loves data in general, I frequently create dashboards to convey information about key performance indicators and metrics of interest to project stakeholders. Most recently, at work I’ve been digging into product usage data and have been using Elasticsearch and Kibana to create dashboards. So, what makes a dashboard effective and why does everyone want to use them?

Why Build Dashboards?

Dashboards are ultimately a communication tool, and share a lot of design principles with other deliverables found in the field of Technical Communication. Typically dashboards tend to automatically refresh compared to…

New to Dash or Python?

It has been over a year since I created pythondashboards.com to help people learn the Dash framework, and my tutorials have gotten over 300,000 views to date. I am truly thankful to everyone that has supported me and found my content helpful. I appreciate the feedback and will continue to publish content to help beginners and everyone else master the Dash library.

A Life of Games and Data

I tend to gravitate towards games that revolve around strategy and data, some examples being Magic: The Gathering, Path of Exile, and most recently BattleTech.

Created in the 80’s, the BattleTech universe is akin to an intergalactic space opera depicting battles between towering battlemechs and the mechwarriors that pilot them. Since the BattleTech tabletop war game has been around for over 30 years, it has gone through many iterations of rules and there are a ton of units that can be used to build squads and wage intergalactic war. …

Human Image Synthesis

Over the past couple years, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have taken Data Science by storm. If you are not familiar with GANs and want a quick glimpse at what they can do, check out the website deepdreamgenerator.com. I used that to generate the article image!

Since I haven’t yet played with them, I want to see what all the hype is about! I found some tutorials and started researching GANs. Anyone looking to break into GANs, I highly recommend these two YouTube channels:

Although I will not get too deep into the foundations of GANs, I recommend checking out the…

Need a New Universe?

While everyone was stuck inside during the Covid-19 pandemic, board games and tabletop games erupted in popularity. One of the games I’ve been falling in love with is BattleTech. Created in the 80’s, the BattleTech universe is akin to an intergalactic space opera depicting battles between towering battlemechs and the mechwarriors that pilot them. Over the years, it has matured into a vast sci-fi intellectual property that offers something for everyone: Explore the endless lore through volumes of novels, play as a mechwarrior controlling a giant robot in various videogames, and master mech-squad tactics via the Tabletop/board games.

Since the…

Creating the Auto-Sommelier

Back in August 2019, I put my first Natural Language Processing (NLP) project into production and hosted the Auto-Sommelier on my website. Using TensorFlow 1 and the Universal Sentence Encoder, I allow users to describe their ideal wine, and return wines with a description that is similar to the query. The tool transforms wine reviews and user input into vectors and calculates the cosine similarity between user input and the wine reviews to find the most similar results.

Cosine Similarity is a popular measure for comparing document similarity because it works well with data where things like term frequency is…

Tell Stories with your Data

When I started working on the company’s Data Science team, one of my first projects was enhancing one of the business intelligence dashboard web apps. Working in Data science, you need to know how to visualize data because you often have to communicate information about data, models, and results to an audience.

Thinking about the app’s users, I knew the audience was going to vary in terms of data literacy so I would need effective visualizations to help them digest the numbers. …

Starting to Work with Data?

My love for data started at a young age listening to my parents talk about stocks, but it really took off about 9 years ago when I first discovered SQL. To get better at analyzing data, a few years back I joined a data analysis boot camp, got better at coding, and changed my entire life. Now, I’ve been working on a Data Science team as a Software Product Analyst for almost two years, and I still love data.

In this article, I’ll introduce variables and discuss why you need to understand them for machine learning. By the end you’ll…