I recently decided to switch from Pandas to Polars for my Python projects that use dataframes. I came to this decision while taking a workshop on Polars last week: I found its syntax to be so intuitive that I couldn’t justify continuing to try to get “better” at Pandas, ...

I am happy to announce that my new R package, zctaCrosswalk, is now on CRAN. This package contains the US Census Bureau’s 2020 ZCTA to County Relationship File, as well as convenience functions to translate between States, Counties and ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs). You can install the package like ...

When I took my first software engineering job at Electronic Arts 20 years ago someone told me “More time is spent maintaining old software than writing new software.” Since my project at the time (“Spore”) was brand new, and I was writing brand new code for it, I found that hard ...

I recently created a few datasets to facilitate analyzing the interaction between demographics and political party affiliations of US Congressional Districts. My goal was to create this graph: I added this data to Choroplethr and pushed the new version to CRAN. This post walks you through using these datasets, the ...

Choroplethr v3.6.4 is now on CRAN. This is the first update to the package in two years, and was necessary because of a recent change to the tigris package, which choroplethr uses to make Census Tract maps. I also took this opportunity to add new example demographic data for Census ...

Next Tuesday (September 3) I will be giving a talk at the Bay Area R User Group titled Behind the Scenes of an R Consortium Project. This will be my first time speaking about my work with the R Consortium, and I encourage you to attend! Over the last few years ...

I recently became an RStudio Certified Trainer, and thought that it might interest the broader R Community to learn about this new program. For those who don’t know, RStudio has recently put together a process to independently verify that R trainers (a) are proficient with the Tidyverse and (b) ...

Last week the Census Bureau published a free course I created on using Choroplethr to map US Census Data. Unfortunately, a few people have reported problems when following one of the examples in the course. This post describes that issues and provides instructions for working around it. Where does the ...

Today I am happy to announce that a new free course on Choroplethr – Mapping Census Bureau Data in R with Choroplethr – is available on Census Academy, the US Census Bureau’s new training platform! (Choroplethr is a suite of R packages I created for mapping demographic statistics).This course is ...

Two weeks ago I mentioned that I was clearing my calendar until I finished writing A Guide to Working with Census Data in R. Today I’m... The post “A Guide to Working With Census Data in R” is now Complete! appeared first on AriLamstein.com.

It’s been a while since I shared any information about the R Consortium’s Census Working Group. Today I’d like to share an update on three... The post Update on the R Consortium Census Working Group appeared first on AriLamstein.com.

As I mentioned in July, my proposal to the R Consortium to create a Guide to Working with Census Data in R was accepted. Today I’d like... The post Update on R Consortium Census Guide appeared first on AriLamstein.com.