Ryan Robitaille

A fun little Viz I did about Bigfoot sightings.

Basically, I harvested all the sighting info off of The Bigfoot Field Research Organization site with Python and the Scrapemark module – inserted it into a local SQL Server database – cleaned it up and threw up a pretty looking Viz using Tableau Public.

Visualizing Squatch of the Nation!

I’m pretty happy with it – its quite interactive and hopefully someone finds it fun or interesting.

Twitter. It’s everywhere. It’s Data. Realtime, Social, Contextual Data. But, if you want to do any real trending, data mining, post-processing, or even simple analysis on it – you really need to be making a historical record of what you’re looking for and store it in a usable way. I will show you how to create SQL Server tables and use a simple Python script to pull out tweets and save them for future analysis.

I’ve been messing around with Tableau Public for a few nights, and I must say that it is damned impressive, and I’ve used a LOT of Reporting / Analysis / Business Intelligence tools in my day.

I needed to do a proper test / POC; the question was – what kind of data do I use to give it a proper test drive?

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge Metallica fan, hell for as long as I can remember, that’s just been “one of my things” (as many current, ex-girlfriends, and ex-wives can attest to)…

Now any Python duct-taper integrate-anything junkie like me has a need to schedule their things (in production) every once in awhile. Usually this is not a problem – Unix / Linux cron jobs handle this nicely – but for a client or job that runs on a Windows server – the built-in “Scheduled Tasks” just [...]

A few months ago, I showed how you can do simple back and forth ETL task with python scripts – this time I’m going to take it one step further and show how with an extra python module we can actually export data to a usable Excel format as well. I often use this method [...]

In the Data Transformation Services (DTS) / Extract Transform and Load (ETL) world these days we’ve got a LOT of expensive ass products. Some are good, some are marginal, and some are pieces of over-complicated (and poorly performing) java-based shit. But, hey, enough with the negativity – I digress, I just want to show you [...]