About

I’ve been publishing my writing since high school in the late 90s, tinkering with Linux since 2004, and making websites professionally since 2005.

Along the way, I’ve researched and written articles and books on extreme memory improvement, published short stories, plays, and seven novels, written and acted in short films and podcasts, released open source tools I’ve coded, and finally, discovered the field where I can use all my favorite skills at once: data science.

These days, I’m seeking a mission-driven organization that’s working to solve a global problem that doesn’t get enough attention. (Yes, I’m a fan of effective altruism and the 80,000 hours podcast.)

In 2001, I graduated summa cum laude with both a B.A. in Philosophy and a B.A. in Communications from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.

After a few years doing Curriculum Development (writing, editing, and graphic design) with a small education company, I’ve been self-employed since 2004. My web development company, Wineskin Websites, has served non-profits and small businesses for over 15 years. I’ve always interacted with my clients directly, and I relish providing excellent customer care.

Meanwhile, under my pen name Bill Alive, I’ve been publishing nonfiction and fiction, releasing games, and even writing and acting in short films.

In 2017, I hired an amazing designer, Christopher Capio, and he continues to level up everything I release. I work closely with him as his art director, iterating until his designs shine.

In 2022, I earned a MicroMasters in Data Science from UC San Diego. As I discuss below, data science is the perfect next phase for me, bringing all my core skills to work together.

In the early days, ”web development” meant learning languages like Perl and PHP, and using tools like Joomla and Drupal. My clients have always been small businesses and non-profits, and as they got more tech-savvy and cost-conscious, I learned to leverage WordPress and its fantastic plugin ecosystem to deliver complex, boutique results with a minimum of custom code.

But I’ve always been drawn to big, complex challenges. My favorite web projects were massive migrations.

These days, I seek the more meaningful problems that come with software engineering, crafting stories (especially novels), and analyzing data.

Which has brought me to data science.

Data science lets me bring all my major skills to the table: elegant coding, intense intellectual analysis, and finding the compelling stories in this data that can make complex topics understandable to non-experts.

Over the last few years, I’ve realized that both my client work and my personal projects are centering more and more on data.

Why did I first get serious about learning R and Python? So I could craft personal data dashboards.

What was I really doing when I experimented with every major techique for memory improvement? From a certain point of view, isn’t “remembering” all about managing data? Plus, to make data more memorable, you look for patterns and relationships… which is exactly what you do with data analysis.

Even my “simple” ongoing responsibility of maintaining the membership rolls for a music non-profit has proven to be a thorny problem that is ultimately data science, best solved by a Jupyter notebook that I can rerun every month with fresh data.

Data science means both coding and thinking and writing and telling stories. I love it.

This is why I’ve leveled up and completed the MicroMasters in Data Science from UC San Diego. Not since my six-week Odyssey Writing Workshop have I had such an intense academic experience. To earn this MicroMasters Certificate, which is accepted as 30% of a Master’s Degree at RIT, I completed four graduate-level courses in about two months… with all As.

Since then, I’ve published several Jupyter notebooks, each of which explores a complex question using an official dataset.

I’ve also released an open source Python tool, yarm, that makes it dead simple for mere mortals to run SQL queries on spreadsheets and CSV files without having to learn pandas or fire up a Jupyter notebook. I use yarm myself even in my Jupyter notebooks, because it automates several of the nitpicky setup chores of cleaning data and preparing it for analysis.

(I love analyzing tedious, repetitive processes and crafting an elegant simplification.)

Data science needs both analysis and communication. I excel at both, and I’d love to put both at your service.

You can explore my skills and projects further through the sidebar links, or reach out and contact me right now.