Blog

Something I've found repeatedly through my career is that people love good data visualizations. From the telemetry I've gathered on several products, they're regularly the most visited pages in SaaS applications. Just as importantly, they're one of the best demos in any given sales pitch. Executives love to see charts, and with good reason. They bring clarity to massive data stores, and can provide insight where there was none.

Late last year, I performed an extensive evaluation of various business intelligence solutions. My team was looking for a product that could replace and augment our homegrown dashboards without unnecessarily constraining our design and development workflows. I ultimately evaluated about 25 tools on the following criteria:

One thing I really appreciated about my undergraduate program, Human-Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, was the emphasis on building a portfolio. Building a portfolio helped me reflect on my work and learn how to craft a story. The ultimate artifact has helped me land jobs and given me something useful to talk about during interviews with prospective employers. Here's the story of my portfolio creation process and some of the milestones in my journey.

I've really enjoyed using embedded BI tools as a way to provide reporting to users. These tools perform a few important functions, but decoupling business logic, data storage, and charting is key. I have recently used Tableau, Looker, and PowerBI, each of which has an embedded model, each with its own upsides and downsides. Recently, I led a project to move from Looker to PowerBI for embedded reporting, and here's what I learned.

As someone who has spent years writing TypeScript, learning Rust has been challenging, but a lot of fun. TypeScript gives you some safety without getting in your way, while Rust gives you safety by making you work much harder. Here are a few things I learned during my journey.

Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen is one of the more interesting books I read this year. As an engineer, the premise appeals to me broadly. I know that we can fix problems before they happen, or at least before they become too big. Doing so would be massively efficient for any household, business, or for society as a whole.

The first JavaScript framework that I ever used was Backbone.js. Coming from the spaghetti world of prototype.js and jQuery, it was incredible to use a MVC framwork for the first time. A whole class of bugs was eliminated and building larger applications became increasingly possible.

Reading Cadillac Desert as the son of a hydrologist was a personal experience. Marc Reisner’s sweeping history of water in the American West is already gripping on its own, but when you grow up hearing about salmon runs, river basins, and floods at the dinner table, the book is truly fascinating. Reisner visited my dad's graduate seminar at the University of Washington in the early 1990s, so I felt like I had to read this book to better understand how hydrologists think.

I recently helped apply for and received a patent (US9182758) for "Computer-implemented system and method for capability zone-based manufacturing quality control". I'm very proud of this work, and I'd like to briefly explain it.