About Joe
Hi there! Glad you made it. Want to get in touch? Send me a message: joe @ this website or click email/twitter below. You know the drill.
- I am interested in the overlap of social systems, math/technology/data, and urban environments.
- I hope to help communities (especially in cities of the Global South) solve local problems with technology & data.
- I think we can do a better job of creating global/open/free resources to help solve those problems (e.g. Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap).
- I enjoy playing with data (census, quantified self, basketball).
- I'd like to be better at node ~~Python~~, and am working on it.
Things I've done somewhat recently:
- Worked at Santa Fe Institute to bring census-like data collection tools to slum dwellers worldwide, gather worldwide census data, and conduct research to understand cities (project in partnership with Slum/Shack Dwellers International, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation).
- Managed projects at Periscopic, a data visualization company with the aim to "do good with data", for clients including Unicef, Yahoo!, GE, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Hewlett Foundation.
- Attended Reed College where I also wrote a thesis on creative destruction (PDF Link - sorry!), and conducted research on peer learning effects.
I also spend my time reading (books and articles), biking, cooking, writing Python, swinging kettlebells, playing ultimate Frisbee, being human, and walking outside. Oh and sleeping.
For a more organized and in depth history of Joe, please see my CV. If you really want to know the earliest details, my first job was as a bike repair apprentice and I graduated high school in 2005.
About This Website
This site runs on the Python-Powered Pelican static site generator. Read about how I built the website in this post. You can explore the code on GitHub. It is served on GitHub Pages, via CloudFlare (with easy & free SSL).
Homepage: The homepage data is stored in Google Docs (via IFTTT) and visualized with Python (my Pelican gdocs plugin and similar tutorial for JS version). Data is processed on my shiny Digital Ocean server. I use a cron job to get new data and regenerate the site daily (at the strike of midnight).
Charts: Coffee chart is made using a <table>, CSS, and lots of Joe. Daily steps chart is made with the Chartist.js library.
Design: I designed the site with a lot of inspiration from others. Thank you others. The fonts are EB Garamond and Open Sans, served using base64 encoding. I used Pure CSS as my css foundation.
It is amazing how many people did great work so I could build a website. Pretty cool.