I've been busy.
Sometime back in February or March, I took up tenure at Invite Media in Philadelphia. Remember all that pissing and moaning I was doing about startups in Philadelphia? Yeah. Turns out I was wrong. This operation is a full-out Paul Graham party. There's not all too many people working here, but rest assured they're all bell-curve-busting smart. The kind of people where your jaw drops just a bit more every day you work with them. I had to interview and hire a lot of people at my last job, and I'm kind of in awe that these guys were able to pull that off. I was certainly never able to do so.
It's a nice place. I take smoke breaks on the roof. I see a lot of stray balloons. Here's a picture.
The work I do is the kind of work I dream of doing in my free time. They buy all the food. They buy whatever beers I want to drink. Now all I have to is make a convincing argument for the need of data visualization for the scale of raw data we are crunching. One track mind? Perhaps.
We have interesting traffic patterns. These are really quick sketches, but here's how I see it in my mind:
And here's how I want other people to see it:
Or something close to that. People will sometimes call Tufte out for one reason or another. I often have a hard time disagreeing. He is a bit of an idealist. Regardless, visualization is the quickest and most efficient route between mounds of data and a concrete understanding. Often times, rules of business (read: over-the-top presentation) come in to play, and they can't be ignored on any practical scale. Tufte is a lever to pull -- an invaluable counterbalance you can't ignore while pursuing the flashier side of the art.
That's just kind of rambling garbage, though. I'm still piecing together my thoughts on the subject. I believe the top 10% of people who have honed the skill of properly visualizing massive sets of data are going to be in a pretty sweet boat in the coming years, and I've been spending a lot of time sharpening that axe.
But, mostly, there are a lot of posts I wanted to make, but felt that I shouldn't post them until remarking on the new job. A hasty, rambling post is sometimes needed.