Hi, I'm Zach!
- Florida Man 🌴 currently in Virginia
- One dog that loves me, one cat that chooses to be nice to me sometimes
- Professional question asker, ever determined to get to the bottom of things 🤔
- Started in psychology, now a general data engineer
- Lifelong learner
I like to stay busy and try out new tools (and/or just play with data). Most recently, I've been working on:
- Squirdle is the Pokémon response to Wordle, where you guess a Pokémon and get feedback on how your guess compares to the secret target Pokémon.
- I've played at least one game from every generation of the series, but I'm an old man so I don't really know any Pokémon after about Generation 4 (there are currently 9 generations).
- It was driving me crazy to feel like I could never get the target Pokémon if it came from Gen 5+, so I wanted to build an automated player to supplement the gaps in my knowledge. Then I wanted that player to actually be good, so I tried to help it get any secret Pokémon in as few guesses as possible.
- My patent-pending Squirdle Solver:tm: uses something like a binary search approach to iteratively guess the median Pokémon given the set of remaining possible guesses. "Median" takes into account all 5 features that the game provides information about: generation, type 1, type 2, height, and weight.
- Pro tip: start with Simipour! :droplet::monkey:
- Used data from the Open Science Framework to profile the collaboration network of current staff (in March, 2022) at the Center for Open Science.
- Data was gathered via the OSF API (thank you amazing devs for amazing docs!) using the requests module in Python.
- Storage managed locally in a SQLite DB.
- Analysis and report done in Jupyter Notebook with pandas and matplotlib.
- Used data from Web of Science to create a citation network visualization centered on Dr. Mark Davis.
- Mark is a family friend who retired from a career as a research psychologist in 2020, and this was his Christmas present to commemorate his impact in the literature.
- Data was gathered manually from WOS then processed in Python with pandas.
- Visualizations created in R using ggplot2 enhanced with ggraph.
- Computing for Data Analysis | Georgia Tech via EdX | Enrolled, expected completion May, 2023
- Data Engineer | DataQuest | Completed April, 2022 | Certificate