I cook a lot, and especially on weekend mornings I’ll make a big breakfast for the family. Oftentimes, I’ll make pancakes. I’m vegan, so the typical pancake recipe that likely includes eggs and milk doesn’t work for me. There are some good vegan recipes out there, but sometimes I…

Summary according to ChatGPT There are two broad categories when it comes to data products: treating data as a product and actually building data products. Treating data as a product involves shifting focus away from service-oriented work, interacting and understanding users deeply, planning and reviewing work in the style of a product manager, and…

Over the last few weeks I’ve had fun playing around with the OpenAI API. This time I got interested in what the till could do if I just fed it a dataset. To my surprise (though I’m less and less surprised the more I try things out), the response…

I really like to read and listen to audiobooks — thankfully the library has both physical books as well as audiobooks and ebooks available and Amazon fills in the gaps if I want to buy the book. I track all the books I want to read and have read…

The City of Syracuse’s Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation launched an open data challenge this month, with a prompt of using the Syracuse Public Art dataset to build an interesting visualization, web app, or something else interesting. …

When I was in fifth grade, I had a writing assignment that asked for each student to create a step-by-step guide to do any task we liked. I remember one student wrote a guide to putting a golf ball, another wrote a guide to typing your shoes. …

This is coming a few weeks before the official anniversary, but since there’s a big celebration of the accomplishment this weekend, I thought I’d write. I was a senior in high school and had been admitted to Syracuse University. While this is where I likely wanted to go to college…

When I first started working for the City of Syracuse, the team’s first task was to help find new solutions for dealing with the City’s aging and increasingly failing infrastructure. As I attempted to analyze data, it was increasingly clear that the City’s data infrastructure was also aging and failing. …

Last week, I wrote about the barriers to data driven decision making in government, covered in the first week of the class I teach in the Executive MPA program at Syracuse University. In this week’s class, we talked about the framework around which data and analytics projects can be implemented…