Charlotte on Kailas Venkitasubramanian

Embracing multilingualism in data science

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Both of those efforts — reproducibility and pipelines — rest on a more basic question: which programming languages should a small research team actually use? In the previous posts of this series, I covered why reproducibility matters and how we are designing reproducible data pipelines at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. This post is about the layer underneath both.

Specifically, I want to argue that embracing multilingualism—fluency in both R and Python, rather than loyalty to one—has quietly done more for our team’s output than almost any other choice we’ve made.

Changing CRDT operations under a Cloud

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The promise and peril of a large contract

Much of the previous challenges in managing the technical operations at the data trust stemmed from a lack of understanding of the scope and extent of effort for a given piece of work and having no barometer to measure productivity (or the lack of it). This meant that everyone knew that a given piece of work took 1 month to complete, everyone agreed that this delay was not acceptable,but no one really could pinpoint where the bottlenecks were and why they existed.

Revamping the Charlotte Regional Data Trust - The story so far

Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Plunging into the Data Trust black box, and Deep Cleaning the System

Sat, 20 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Diving into the world of administrative data and CRDT

Administrative data is messy is not much of an adage as much as it is a reality. When I took reins of managing the data infrastructure and analytical operations of Institute for Social Capital or ISC (now called the Charlotte Regional Data Trust) in the middle of 2021, messiness extended beyond data. The dysfunction was deep in how data was collected and organized, the way data operations and analyses were conducted, how information was collected from stakeholders, and how data was disseminated.

Making Data Pipelines for the Quality of Life Explorer seamless

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

The idea of building a full-fledged data and computational infrastructure to support the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Quality of Life (QoL) Explorer didn’t start with an explicit demand for it. Rather, we were grappling with a deliverables backlog that had accumulated during the Covid-19 pandemic and needed to make up ground to keep the explorer up-to-date and meet deadlines.

What's work like?

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000