Bio
I’m a Staff Analytics Engineer working at logos.com, out of West Fargo, North Dakota. I have created open source projects that have been downloaded over 50,000 times, created Business Intelligence and Data Science teams at large financial institutions and taught coding and data science to hundreds along the way. My main tech stack is R and python along with SQL, Julia and a few others.
I attended North Dakota State University and grabbed a BA in Business Administration as well as an MBA later on in my career.
I started off my career in transportation and eventually migrated to the data side of things; most recently as a Business Intelligence Strategist at a regional bank and now as a Data Scientist. I work in both AWS and Azure stacks and heavily utilize Databricks and Posit Connect in my day-to-day.
I am a certified RStudio Tidyverse Instructor, and enjoy my time introducing folks to the R language as well as upskilling seasoned R operators. More here.
I sit on the board of the North Dakota State University Center for Enterprise Business Analytics and help guide their buildout of a world-class institution in the data realm.
Interests
Data visualization: I’m a big fan of Edward Tufte’s work in data visualization as well as Stephen Few’s. I like to tune my visualizations to the frequency that folks actually perceive and understand the data art on the screen or paper.
Geospatial data science: I’ve enjoyed working on dozens of geospatial projects throughout my career. I place special emphasis on the data visualization aspect of the art as well as user experience.
R shiny application development: Building Shiny apps within the Golem framework is my preferred delivery method for the data science projects I work on. I find the robustness of Golem mated with the unlimited potential of Shiny to far outshine the more rigid, institutional BI tools out there.
Open source: I’ve created a small handful of open source projects that have been gaining traction.
📦 schrute R package creator, as well as versions for python and Julia
📦 tidyUSDA R package creator; grabs USDA data in tidy format for analysis
📦 cheatsheets R package creator; downloads all RStudio cheatsheets locally
📦 proverbs R package creator; print out a daily Bible proverb to your console
Selected publications
Awards & patents
Prairie Business 40 Under 40 - 2017
Patent - Methods and apparatus for determining geographic pre-incident risk exposure
Personal life
I have an amazing wife and three young children that I get to spend most of my time with. We stay active in our local Church and love spending time at the lake cabin in the summer with extended family.
As a cancer survivor, I’ve volunteered as a mentor to cancer patients and survivors for more than a decade.
My main past times include exercise (rucking, weight training, sandbag training), hunting and woodworking - check out my un-maintained blog)
Technistema
The title of this site, technistema, is a portmanteau of the Greek techne and episteme. Techne can be translated as craftsmanship or art, and episteme means knowledge or understanding. In all my work I strive to integrate both of these views, which means I may rely on the expert knowledge of staff as well as statistical methods to create an analysis. A work ethic that drifts too far towards either pole is in danger of group think or similar flaws.