February 26, 2025

Making data useful

How do we turn messy data into profit?

Making data useful is difficult. The whole point of data engineering/science/analysis/etc is to turn all of the endless piles of information we collect into something that people find valuable. I've spent the better part of the last decade in my career as a software engineer building systems that do this, and I've noticed that it is remarkably difficult to do well. There are many points where the process breaks down, and no silver bullet for fixing them. I've spent a lot of time trying to organize my thoughts on the topic and wrote this down one night: […3 min read]

post#data-engineering#data-science

July 18, 2024

Data Manipulation in Clojure Compared to R and Python

I spend a lot of time developing and teaching people about Clojure's open source tools for working with data. Almost everybody who wants to use Clojure for this kind of work is coming from another language ecosystem, usually R or Python. Together with Daniel Slutsky, I'm working on formalizing some of the common teachings into a course. Part of that is providing context for people coming from other ecosystems, including "translations" of how to accomplish data science tasks in Clojure. […13 min read]

post#clojure#data-science#python#r#scicloj

January 12, 2024

Clojure Tidy Tuesdays

One of the things I'm going to spend my new-found independent software development time on this year is doing TidyTuesdays in Clojure. It's no surprise that I'm a big fan of Clojure, or that I think there is a lack of good "how to do data science with Clojure" content out there. One of the big things I want to accomplish this year is filling this gap. […1 min read]

post#clojure#data-science#tidy-tuesdays