hilarymason.com lives again! I’ve migrated to hosted wordpress, so keeping the server up is no longer my problem. 😁
I’d like this site to help you figure out who I am and what I do, share what I’m working on now, let people get in touch, and be a place for me to share some personal thoughts and works-in-progress.
If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
Posted: January 6, 2015 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog, projects | Tags: book, culture, data, data science | Comments Off
I’m excited that my short book, Data Driven: Creating a Data Culture, co-authored with DJ Patil, is out in the world!
We talk about processes and qualities of strong data teams and how to design for these cultural practices in an organization.
The book is available for free on O’Reilly’s site, and soon on Amazon. I hope you enjoy it.
Posted: January 1, 2015 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: google, streetview | Leave a comment »
Something fun to start off the new year — I found myself in Google Street View!
(A quick search of tumblr posts with streetview in the URL leads to a lot of fun, related stuff.)
Posted: February 14, 2014 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: data, food | Leave a comment »
I spent a few minutes this week putting together a quick script to pull data from the Locu API. Locu has done the hard work of gathering and parsing menus from around the US and has a lot of interesting data (and a good data team).
The API is easy to query by menu item (like “cheeseburger”, my favorite) and by running my little script I quickly had data for the prices of cheeseburgers in my set of zip codes (the 100 most populated metro areas in the US).
I’m a big fan of Pete Warden’s OpenHeatMap tool for making quick map visualizations, and was able to come up with the following:
The blue map is the average price of a cheeseburger by zip, with the red one showing the average price of pizza. The most expensive average cheeseburger can be found in Santa Clara, CA, ironically the city currently hosting the Strata data science conference this week. Have fun with those $18 cheeseburgers, colleagues!
You can also see some fun words in the pizza topping options:
In this plot, the x-axis is roughly geographic (ordered by zip code) and the y-axis is in order of popularity, with pepperoni being the most popular common pizza topping, and anchovies among the least.
This is just a quick look at some data, but hopefully it’ll encourage you to play with your food (data)!
Posted: December 18, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: email, hack, twitter | 3 Comments »
It turns out that it’s pretty easy to co-opt Twitter’s Lead Generation card for anything where you want to gather a bunch of e-mail addresses from your Twitter community. I was looking for people willing to alpha test a little side project of mine, and it worked great and didn’t cost anything.
The tweet itself:
Love tech discussion but looking for a better community? Help me beta test a side project! https://t.co/H3DYjbCy19
— Hilary Mason (@hmason) December 12, 2013
I created it pretty easily:
And that’s it! Tweet enthusiastically, then wait patiently, because if you don’t integrate your Twitter card with your CRM, you have to wait ~24 hours for the download link to appear in the Twitter cards manager. The resulting CSV looks like this:
Timestamp,User id,Name,Twitter handle,Email 2013-12-12T23:36:05,774485611,Robots Rule,RobotzRule,h+robots@bit.ly
A little bit of awk later and I had a list of e-mails ready to go. I ended up getting 49 responses through the Google form and 197 through the Twitter card. It was easy and I’ll definitely do this next time I need to collect people’s e-mail addresses for a project.
Hi. I'm Hilary Mason. 