Well, I finally did it. I started a blog.

I have a variety of reasons for venturing into the blogosphere. First, I like to tell stories. Writing these stories down is a good exercise because, in verbal form, my stories have a tendency to meander off on unforeseen (though completely necessary) tangents. Second, blogs have become a go-to for me when seeking answers to my programming-related questions so I decided to start contributing to this resource base. Finally, some really cool and innovative stories are being told via blog posts by data scientists these days. Check out David Robinson’s great piece that analyzed Trump’s tweets and confirmed that Trump writes only the (angrier) Android half. In another cool post, Charlie Thompson recently used data from Spotify and Genius Lyrics to find Radiohead’s most depressing song.

With the ubiquity of data in our everyday lives, telling creative and data-driven stories is increasingly possible. With the strange political (and literal) climate situation, people are looking for ways to speak out or, occasionally, tune out. So, while it’s too early to say if this blog will follow a consistent theme, expect semi-quantitative ramblings on the environment, coding (particularly R), politics, beer, and music. Lots of music.