Michael Balson

background

Everyone and everything has a story.

My passion is discovering those stories and creating new ones.

As a data analyst, I find hidden meaning in data and use it to tell a story that drives decision making.

As a freelance developer, I told stories others could not to encourage user engagement on the web.

Now, I'm looking for the next chapter in my own story and I hope you can be a part of it.

Projects
Micro Center

Micro Center

Data Analysis
PythonSQLJupyter NotebookJavascriptTableauGoogle Sheets
View Project Page
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about moving to a new area and considering aspects of places I've lived previously that I missed. One of those was being close to a Micro Center, which led me to ask, which locations would be most suitable for a possible new expansion of Micro Center?
Penitent Nomad

Penitent Nomad

Data Analysis
PythonJupyter NotebookJavascriptTableauGoogle Sheets

QUESTION

I want to know how many areas in the United States are within so many miles of different stores. For example: Which areas in the United States are within 100 miles of an IKEA and 30 miles of a Micro Center? What if I wanted areas also within 50 miles of Store C and 20 miles of Store D?

STORES

The criteria I used for picking stores was first - if it was a store that I enjoyed visiting and second - stores with a relatively limited number of locations, since many larger retail chains are ubiquitous in most or all regions of the country.

DATA

All store data was gathered by myself and was either scraped directly from their websites using Python's sracpy package or found on an open API endpoint. Data was organized and cleaned using a combination of custom Python and JavaScript scripts and Google Sheets.
ColorGen

ColorGen

React App
NodeReactTypescriptSASS

WHAT

ColorGen is a color shade generator that turns colors into configurable CSS custom parameters.

WHY

While working on a project I was looking for a way to generate many CSS custom parameters for different colors I wanted to experiment with. Although I was able to achieve most of what I needed with SASS, I decided to write a simple JavaScript script so it was easier to use. That little script developed into a much more robust app.
Skills
Open