Personal Data and Code Projects

I usually try to keep my Python sharp with side projects, whether at work, or for fun. I can’t always publish these projects, but I’ve tried to collect some here, because I think my weird projects are one of the best ways to understand what I care about.

Note that it’s extremely likely there are broken links below - I do try to clean them up, but it’s hard to maintain every bit of code!

Most recently (2022) I branched out from coding to play the role of project manager, recruiting an ML engineer to help modernize the a data set of dead languages at the University of Texas’s Linguistics Research Center, then upload it to GitHub and Hugging Face.

In 2020 I discovered a Seattle pet registration data set, which have given me a “pet” project to tinker with for a couple of years. I also participated in NaNoGenMo 2020 by training a neural network on P.G. Wodehouse. It was what I’d consider an absurdist project, for reasons I lay out in the project page.

Before that I used Python to express my love of Classics (aka the subject I was originally trained in). My first Twitter bot, YourDailyVergil, tweeted the whole of Vergil’s Aeneid. After that I changed its algorithm, and name, and made YourDailyOwl, to tweet Vergil both English and Latin, and to replace random nouns with the word for “owl,” because I thought it was funny. I also made a bot, Sir ExclaimsALot, to Tweet in the style of Ron Burgundy. Unfortunately, Twitter has stopped letting friendly art bots thrive :(

I also used Python/Django to make an API for the Roman poet Ovid. It may not be working, because of course, maintenance is the problem. But I was really pleased with how it helped me think about data structures and language, which was the ultimate point — well, that and making sure that Ovid had his own API, given that someone had already built one for Vergil!