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:
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 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.
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.
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.