Hello!

I’m John, a self-taught data professional from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Over my 17 year career, I have a developed a strong background in data, analytics, and transportation. I am also the owner of my solo consulting firm, Corvid Analytics, where I provide solutions & services to help small businesses work with their data.

In my personal life, I have a passion for reading and am a classically trained flutist. I have recently taken up birdwatching as a hobby and have enjoyed learning about different species and their behaviors.

I was married to my wife Ashley in 2021 and we are the proud owners of a sweet dog named Finn. In my free time, I enjoy spending quality time with my family and friends, and am always looking for new ways to learn and grow.

This site hosts my writing on work, data, and life. Some of the projects I’ve worked on in my data journey are also showcased here.

I write and share when I find a topic that captures my interest. My goal is to ensure each post is an honest representation of my hands-on experiences working in data.

Blog

My wife and I have been house hunting for several months, and the mortgage rate market in the United States has been up and down. I’ve find myself looking at rates from local lenders daily, navigating to their websites and writing the rates down or mentally taking note of where they are at. It’s difficult to see trends and understand if rates are rising or falling over time since, although there are daily fluctuations, meaningful changes take place over weeks or months.

Last year, I posted my first “Year in Review” and it was a great way for me to reflect and document some of my new experiences and projects I completed. I had fun learning how to optimize apps and sites I created and customize templates & themes others built. I also had my first ever pull request approved for an open source project! Here are some of the highlights from my last year.

Overview I started lap swimming this year and once I discovered Metabase Actions I thought it was the perfect way to track my workouts! This tutorial will show how to build an app to track swimming workouts using Metabase’s new Actions feature. For some general background on Actions, check out my corresponding post to this tutorial. Assumptions & Prerequisites Here’s what you need to build a dashboard Actions: Metabase version 0.

I’ve been using Metabase for personal projects for the last year or so and love their simple and friendly user experience. As a platform it sets up quickly, you can get up and running in about 10 minutes. In Metabase version 0.46, a new feature was released called Actions which enable database write back from Metabase to your database. In my experience this feature is unusual in a BI tool, where most vendors prefer to be the endpoint to an analysis workflow.

For 35 of my 37 years on this planet, I’ve lived in the state of Minnesota. Notorious for its cold winters, I’ve grown a certain affinity for the discomfort January and February bring. With a record low of -32°F (-35.6°C) in my lifetime1, I’ve had a lot of cold weather experience. I like to get outside and feel the bite of the cold and see my breath hanging in the air, for me it’s an invigorating experience!

I made a decision last January to step outside my comfort zone of proprietary low-code tools and start exploring open source projects and tools. I wanted to challenge myself to learn the skills I would need to be self-sufficient owning, using, and deploying analytic tools that fit the projects I wanted to complete. This meant using inexpensive or free frameworks. In order to build the skills I would need, and I planned out experiences that would allow me to learn through hands-on and realistic projects.