Anthony Pesce

Hello đź‘‹ I'm a journalist and software engineer working on the L.A. Times data team.

I use machine learning to report on crime statistics and parse recipes, I publish live election results, and I make maps of Bernie Sanders contributors and the best restaurants in L.A.

My work tends to focus on:

Election results

Publishing election results is a full stack process. On the back end, I write software to download, parse, and transform raw results from the Associated Press and County of Los Angeles. On the front end, I build maps and charts to visualize the results in real time. I also build live-updating widgets for the homescreen of latimes.com.

Campaign finance

Campaign finance records can come from the Federal Election Commission, the California Secretary of State, Los Angeles City, Los Angeles County and more! I write software to download and clean campaign finance records in bulk — then I write more code to clean up business names and occupations, classify the contributions into sectors, and group individual donors.

Recipes & restaurants

I wrote software to dive into the L.A. Times archives and pull out structured recipe data. Then, I built the California Cookbook recipes database from back end to front end.

Social engagement

These projects often start with a question from a colleague: Can we make a Mad Libs for L.A. neighborhoods? How are our readers feeling about the political environment? After some brainstorming, my team finds a creative way to connect with our readers.