Tasty Data Goodies

Au Revoir!

Over two years ago, I wrote my first data story for Swivel's home page on wildfires in California.  Since then, I have watched Swivel grow from a public playground for data lovers to Swivel Business, where people can share and explore their private numbers. I was as excited then as I am today about Swivel's mission to empower the world's data.

In that time I've had the opportunity to grow personally as well, from a student intern to Swivel's marketing and community development gal. I've had the pleasure of working with a brilliant and dedicated team, that also knows when to have a little fun.

So it is with some heartache that I tell you today is my last day at Swivel. I am planning to pursue my PhD in English Literature. You'll probably still see me around Swivel though. (It's become a bit of a second nature to upload good data when I see it these days.) And if you want to keep in touch, you can follow me on Twitter.

It's a girl!

Hi, my name is Anna Lissa Cruz, and I have just recently joined Swivel as a software engineer.  In my previous career incarnation, I was Manager of Network Technologies at M Squared, where I was in charge of the company's IT needs -- computers, printers, fax machines, phones, and pretty much anything you can plug into a wall socket.  After living in Europe for 5 years with my fiance, I reinvented myself and returned to the United States as a web developer, specializing in Ruby on Rails.  Prior to landing at Swivel, I was a Rails developer for the website divinecaroline.com.

I have always loved technology, thanks to my mother who provided my brother and me with video game consoles, computers, camcorders, electronic kits -- you name it.  I also attribute my love for numbers to Mom, who spent weekends reading Billboard Magazine and listening to Casey Casem's Top 40 while I charted the positions of her favorite songs.  I'm excited that working for Swivel merges two of my life-long interests, and that I will be developing side-by-side with an extremely talented team.

source: waxy.org

When I'm not geeking out, I love to cook and try new recipes.  Although not vegetarian, I like to dabble in veggie-friendly cuisine, particularly Indian, Ethiopian and Macrobiotic.  I also spend a lot of time at the gym, enjoy reading, and am trying to teach myself how to play the saxophone.

Think of a witty title here

Hi! My name is Hwan-Joon, and I just joined the Swivel team as a code monkey software engineer. Before coming over to Swivel, I was mainly working on client-side mobile development, so I've got some catching up to do. I have developed and maintained a few Ruby on Rails projects before, but it's always a little different digging around in someone else's code. I'm definitely up to the challenge and looking forward to delving into the Swivel code. I've always enjoyed collecting data, and it's crazy to think that I'll be working with people who are even more obsessed than I am! Just to give you a hint, here's a graph of my Skittles consumption, starting from April of last year:

Skittles distribution graph.

When I'm not coding or collecting data, I enjoy heart-clogging Southern food, proper grammar (I hope I didn't make any mistakes in this post), and enforcing ISO 8601 wherever I can. As a new father (as of 2008-10-24), I'm working from home twice a week, on a semi-maternity paternity leave until December. Expect to see a barrage of baby weight/height charts from me in the coming months!

Please, let me informally introduce myself...

Hi, my name is Natalie and I have just joined Swivel full-time to help out with marketing.  You might have seen some of my data and graphs on Swivel in the last year or so. Some of my favorites are: When Man's Best Friend isn't that Friendly, Who is Bringing Home the Bacon?, and Putting Health in the Hands of Patients. 

Last summer, Swivel hired me as a journalism intern. Hired me -- an English major from Cal who spent a year researching gender in contemporary fairy tales -- to write about data and numbers. Luckily, I didn't have to perform all those lowly duties you imagine when you hear the word, "intern", like answering phones and running around getting Brian and Sara's coffee.  Not once did I have to utter the words, "Was that one sugar or two?" Instead, I learned how to shoot a Nerf gun, play tennis on Wii, and how to scrum with the best of 'em.

But really, I spent my days at our lovely office in San Francisco scouring the news and the web for compelling stories based on data.  What intrigued me the most about Swivel, and still does, is that Swivel offers hope for a place where the stories are based on the numbers, rather than the spin and the hype that characterizes most of the news these days.

In the last year, I have had the opportunity to see Swivel grow from a public playground for data lovers to Swivel Business, where people will be able to compare public and private data and share insights.  I am very excited to be a part of the company as that growth continues.

Part of my new job will be managing Tasty Data Goodies and Swivel Code, our developer's blog for the technically inclined.  I hope that our blogs will be a place where you can come to find tasty data goodies, happenings in the data community, updates about our product, and stories about how Swivel is connecting people through data.  If there is anything you would like to see on either of our blogs, drop me a line.  Check back often!

Is this thing on?

I'm Ben Walsh and I've just joined Swivel as an engineer. My main focus is on user experience, so I'll likely be working closely with Brent at the interface of design and engineering. I've spent my first week diving into the code and I like what I see so far -- the openness and flexibility of Swivel's approach and architecture makes it remarkably easy to Get Things Done. There are some really sharp people here working on some snazzy technology and it's great to be a part of it.

I've been a web developer of some sort for more than ten years. I graduated in Mediaeval History at a time when there was a puzzling shortage of options for those ready and willing to pontificate about the causes of the First Crusade, so I started writing Perl scripts instead. Since then I've built and maintained websites for various companies named after Scottish islands, including a middleware shop and a financial analytics outfit, and done some freelancing. The last three years I've been at StubHub where I focused on client-side development and adding interactive features to the flat event and ticket listings.

In the time I don't spend in the traditional web development cycle of coding, saving, reloading, and swearing, I'm often indulging my interests in books, beer, or baseball or walking the dog.

Usability testing session for traditional window interface.

Check, Check--One, Two, Three

Hi, everyone. My name is Abhay Kumar and I am a new software engineer here at Swivel: I'm working on making data even tastier for everyone. I recently moved to San Francisco from New York, my home of eighteen years. I’ll be working on the core data platform and specifically some of the cool new data comparison features that will be added to Swivel in the next few months... basically, I get to make Swivel smarter!

My background is in biomedical research and curriculum development. I worked on lipid chemistry and RNA interference at the National Institutes of Health and then as a Pre-Health Product Developer with Kaplan. I have always, however, been a freelance web developer and have been active in the New York area Ruby (the programming language that we use to create Swivel) community for about a little over a year. Before I saw the light, I worked on many PHP (another programming language) projects including a bit of hacking Wordpress (a weblog engine) and phpBB (a forum engine).

When I’m not at Swivel, I like to climb big rocks, find strange things while hiking in forests and to organize geek-y events. In New York, I used to play capture-the-flag in public places dodging bike messengers, pedestrians and the occasional city bus. I also like a good game of poker and penguins of all kinds.

Introducing myself...

Hi!  I'm Jesse Robbins, and I recently joined as an Adviser helping Swivel get bigger and more reliable.  Like Sara, my background is a mix of Technology and real-world Emergency Management, and my focus is combining those skills to improve people's lives.

Previously I worked at Amazon.com from 2001-2006 where I was responsible for IT Operations and Availability (my business card read "Master of Disaster").  I'm also a certified Firefighter-1 and Emergency Medical Technician, and have accumulated a number of Hazardous Materials and Technical Rescue certifications.

When I'm not at Swivel I organize BarCampBank & DisasterCamp events, wrangle speakers @ Ignite, and blog for O'Reilly Radar.

Here's a picture from our trip to the OECD World Forum in Istanbul:

in-n-out chocolate shakes with a deploy

so, three of us engineers went down to palo alto today to go watch our friend ge wang perform his on-the-fly computer music laptop orchestra thing (kinda weird, but kinda cool).  on our way back, we decided we better do a deploy before the web 2.0 conference tomorrow, so we pulled up to in-n-out, ordered us up two burgers, a double-double, and a chocolate shake, and while we were waiting in the drive thru line, deployed some changes to the compare ui and some minor features for a solid demo tomorow.  man, technology is cool.

Swivel Hacks

Chris G. over at Swivel-Junkie has written a great tutorial on how to post Swivel graphs onto "forums run by VBulletin (OffTopic, SomethingAwful), as well as onto MySpace."

thanks, Chris.

Data Woodstock at Google Groups

Fellow Swivelers, we've opened up the party gates at Google Groups. Here are the details:

- Get help and tips from other users at Swivel Help.
- Ask for data you're looking for on Swivel Data.
- Brag about interesting graphs at the Swivel Graph group.
- See what other swivelers are up to at Swivel People.

Photo by striatic