JOHN W. MATHENA
Some Links and Stuff (2025-04-05)
I’ve seen other bloggers make posts like this, so Im giving it a go. I often store links I like in my Wiki and I’ll continue to do that. But some links maybe don’t fit so neatly into my predominantly technical wiki while still warranting notice. So I’ll share some of those links here!
Open Data Blues: My Fight to Measure City Worker Salaries and Game With My Friends
Found myself once again wrestling with Open Baltimore Data to measure employee salaries. I consider this project a follow up to my more exploratory analysis of city employee salaries. Fortunately there’s been a data update and this time I’m only looking at FY2024 salaries so I can compare them to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator for Baltimore City in 2024. Unfortunately, there’s still no data dictionary I can find and I still have questions! Their API rate throttling is also annoying and it’s pretty much guesswork to create a URL that will filter data the way you want, but I digress. I’m also just downloading the data set directly from the Open Baltimore Data site since it’s pretty small (approx. 17k rows).
I’ve needed to curate my media intake more thoughtfully for awhile and the US fall election, recent inauguration, and media around them both reminded me time is of the essence. I started by getting off Twitter and moving to Bluesky. I brought most of my follows with me. And while I like all my follows, my Bluesky feed basically just looks like my Twitter feed pre-Musk, which was usually informative but often overwelming.
On Digital Packrats and Why Open Source Rules
In my last post I talked about how exciting and relatively seamless my migration to Hugo was. Wellllll, it broke in prod. NOOO! But I had an idea. I posted on the Hugo forums for help! I posted late on a Friday night; maybe around 8pm or 8:30 (after checking the post it was just before 8pm) but after an hour or a little less, a very nice person named Joe cloned my website repo and started debugging for me.
Hugo is so nice, I migrated twice
After changing my blog and poetry site build systems to Hugo, I thought why not move everything to Hugo?
Same Blog, Different Build. On to Hugo!
I migrated my blog to Hugo! I’ve been using Jekyll to build my blogging site for the past couple years but I read that it is no longer actively supported. Several bloggers I follow have made the switch to Hugo and claim the build speed is a lot faster. Though that’s not really a concern for me at the moment, if I keep publishing here I’ll eventually run into those problems.
Though I don’t feel anything from pt 1 was incorrect, I wanted lend a bit more credulity to AI and Machine Learning work. I’m gonna reference mostly work and posts from a machine learning engineer and tech writer I follow, Vicki Boykis. She has a great post from Feb 2023 on Chat GPT titled “What should you use Chat GPT for?”. Part of her assessment from then:
I’m trying to get in the habit of blogging a bit more frequently so this will seem less collected than other posts.
(Minor spoilers for The Bear season 2 lie ahead)
Episode four of season two of The Bear takes a slight detour from a Chicago family restaurant aiming to reinvent itself to a high-end kitchen in the Netherlands. The Chicago shop’s head chefs send their baker, Marcus, to Copenhagen to learn some new dishes from a pastry chef named Luca.
A WSJ op-ed made its rounds through my little corner of lefty twitter. I’m not a subscriber, so I did not read it. Take this post with however big a grain of salt you feel appropriate.