Tim’s Blog

  • On Leaving A Job After 8 Years

    In tech years, eight years is enough for a gold watch. I went to work for a newly formed company called Method Driven Software in early 2007 as it’s first employee (there were two partner/employees that remain with the firm today in various forms). Through the years, we acquired several firms and rebranded twice, eventually […]

  • Analyzing Spread Football Picks With R

    I’ve been making an effort to learn R for about a year. I have experimented with it on and off over the years, but this is first serious effort I’ve been making. Whenever I am learning something, rather than just focusing on book examples, I try to come up with an example that is relevant […]

  • Running a Local ElasticSearch Cluster for Development

    ElasticSearch is a document database built on Lucene, a full text-search engine. It clusters and is useful in a variety of scenarios. If you want to run it locally and test some of the clustering feature, here are some things I learned from my experience. Install with your preferred package manager, or from source. In […]

  • Thoughts On Leadership and Groups

    Building software teams is hard. Fostering culture, improvement, learning and community in a group of individuals that have other options is a difficult thing to do. Fortunately, it’s not all that different than building many other kind of groups. Yet too often, we fail to look around at other successful groups and learn from their […]

  • Facebook Gender Analysis With R

    I like working with social APIs, and have been working with R more lately. So I combined the two. I saved the json results of asking facebook for all of my friends using the graph api. Using the rjson package for R, I loaded the data into R and broke down the count of friends […]

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