My name is Jonah

I'm a thinker, tinkerer, reader, and do-er in New York. As a Senior Data Engineer Consultant for McKinsey, I'm an analytics practitioner, helping clients across industries address their business problems and delivering analytics-based solutions (i.e., I spend a lot of time working with client and 3rd party data in R and Python, building software and looking for actionable insights). I previously worked as a data scientist for IBM and in strategy, analytics, and marketing roles at IBM, Amazon, and Hearst, and have an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business. My skill set includes Python, R, SQL, Excel, and basic Java, Bash, (Py)Spark, Flask, HTML, and CSS. I built this site using Flask in order to try out a new technology.

Outside work, I'm fascinated by the future of media and national and New York politics. I'm also a long distance runner and an "amateur reader" (to quote J.D. Salinger), with the music taste of a 45-year-old ex-punk.

LinkedIn | GitHub | Email

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Blog posts:

Frequent topics: data science (7), python (7), nyc (6), books (4), music (3), advertising (3)

• A Book Recommender on AWS
  2020-12-18
  Getting started with Docker and AWS Elastic Container Service with a Goodreads-powered book recommender


• Falling Into The Gap
  2020-11-11
  Why data science projects fall short of expectations, and what to do about it


• Time for Revisions
  2018-05-28
  What I learn by rewriting code


• On Getting There
  2017-12-28
  How I became a data scientist


• I Read on the Train
  2017-02-20
  Some thoughts on books I have read recently.


• New Year, New Blumste.in
  2017-01-02
  Rewriting my personal website in Flask and SASS


• Are Last.FM Playcounts Affected by Pitchfork Scores?: A Data Analysis
  2016-12-11
  Fun with python data analysis, web scraping, and the Last.FM API


• A Night at the Museum
  2016-11-30
  Creating a universal API for the American Museum of Natural History at its Hack the Stacks Hackathon


• Making Chloropleths from NYC Parking Tickets Data
  2016-11-19
  Cleaning and mapping data for the 30 million plus parking tickets issued in NYC from 2013 to 2016


• Introducing Group Reduce, a K-Means Algorithm for Clustering Groups
  2016-10-18
  Introducing Group Reduce, a k-means clustering algorithm for reducing the number of groups in a data set (i.e., for clustering groups).


• 2 Quick Thoughts on 'Every Song Ever'
  2016-07-15
  Yep, I have thoughts.


• Favorite recent moment in ad targeting
  2016-05-18
  Ad targeting that's at once effective and not


• Review: Sober Living for the Revolution
  2015-11-27
  20 pages of Ian Mackaye saying straight edge (sXe) is against rules, and then 200 pages of assorted communists, socialists, and anarchists saying 'follow our sXe-derived rules!'


• Fixing the Online News Media's Customer Experience Problem
  2015-01-05
  The emergence of workable news media models should be cheered. But we need to be honest: product deficiencies still abound. Luckily, native and content advertising may solve many of them. Here's why and how they'll do it.


• An Idea for Personalized Alerts from the MTA
  2014-10-20
  The MTA should create a more personal connection with riders by using technology to harness customer data. This data could be used to create personalized alerts for riders.


• 2001: A Space Odyssey Predicts Tablets and 24 Hour News Cycle
  2014-02-06
  Prescient prediction from Arthur C. Clarke, writing in 1968...


• The Facebook Donate Now Button Is Better For Small and Medium-Sized Non-Profits than Ad Grants
  2013-12-19
  The haters are wrong: the Facebook Donate Now button is the best thing it can do for small- and medium-sized non-profits.


• CSS3 Has a Ton of Cool Features. Can we start using them?
  2013-10-27
  In the future, CSS3 will allow developers to build CSS-only animations and gradients, allow for the mixing of pixels and percentages, and make the box model more flexible. Is the future now?


• I Heart #NYCTECH
  2013-10-10
  My awesome week in New York City Tech. Featuring inspiration from Alexis Ohanian!


• Getting Americans into the Banking System, for Good and for Profit
  2013-09-27
  While public sector actions and public-private partnerships will play a role in getting more Americans into the banking system, the financial services industry's resources and drive to improve profits will be a bigger factor.


• Hopes, Dreams, Aspirations (MBA as Training for Product Management)
  2013-08-27
  With the start of business school, I'm planning out my professional life beyond the next year or so for the first time. Thinking about what I really want to do, I've realized that what I'm really passionate is technology and product management. Now I'm trying to learn how to get from point A to point B.