Using Python to Create a Map of Catholic Latin Rite Dioceses, Cathedrals, and Provinces in the US

(Link to project's GitHub page) The Latin Rite of the Catholic Church has over 150 dioceses in the US. Using Python and other open-source tools and resources, I created a map of these dioceses, their cathedrals, and their corresponding provinces. The mapping script (along with additional documentation) can be found here. (If you receive a …

Using Media GeoTag Mapper (MGTM) to Visualize my Travels over the Past 10 Years

This GIF demonstrates the interactive nature of the maps created with Media GeoTag Mapper. The project also lets you create static screenshots of these maps, which I'll show in this blog post. I recently published a GitHub project called Media GeoTag Mapper. This program allows you to extract geotag data (e.g. geographical coordinates) from image …

Arch Calculator: A Python program that applies trigonometry to make 3D modeling easier

The arch_calculator program, which I’ve released under the MIT license, can be found at https://github.com/kburchfiel/arch_calculator . I’d love to deepen my 3D modeling skills using Blender, a free and open-source program. Specifically, I would like to learn how to create Gothic-style stone buildings that I could then import into a game engine like Godot. Within …

Census Folium Tutorial: A Python Program that Shows how to Create Interactive Choropleth Maps of US Census Data at the Zip Code, County, and State Level

Link to GitHub project (released under the MIT license) Link to Google Drive folder containing all project files (including maps that were too large to incorporate into the GitHub project) Choropleth maps are a fun way to visualize data, so I was excited to learn that Folium, a Python mapping library, offers a choropleth mapping …

Creating Open-Source Airline Route Maps using Python and BTS Data

Click here to access my route_maps_builder GitHub repository, which contains open-source route maps and the code used to create them. The repository is licensed under the permissive MIT license. An open-source route map showing many of Delta's domestic routes in 2018. (See below for the limitations of these route maps.) I have always loved looking …

Importing Data into Online Databases Using Python

The upload_to_database function that I used to import data into my Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Heroku databases I greatly enjoyed my Intro to Databases and Intro to Python courses at Columbia Business School earlier this year and gained additional experience with Python and SQL during my summer internship. This fall, …

Python Tutorial Program: Using a Markov Analysis to Produce Randomly Generated Text

Link to the program: https://github.com/kburchfiel/markov_analysis             My 3rd semester at Columbia Business School starts next week. Before registering for classes, I needed to look through lots of online course descriptions to figure out which ones appealed to me the most.             Meanwhile, I had learned about Markov analyses through the book Think Python by Allen …

Google Slides Image Uploader:

A Python Program to Help Automate Google Slides Image Uploads Link to repository: https://github.com/kburchfiel/google_slides_image_uploader To see a video of this program in action, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzr3K8mqvnE. This summer, I imported sets of graphs into various Google Slides presentations. These graphs changed frequently over the course of the summer due to data and formatting updates, so I …

Python Tutorial Program: Retrieving U.S. Census Data

Link to the program and the datasets it created: https://github.com/kburchfiel/census_query_tutorial The US Census Bureau is a great source of freely available information for data analysis projects. Python is not only a useful tool for performing these analyses, but also an excellent option for retrieving US Census data to begin with. A major benefit of using …

Finding a laptop with a high-TDP RTX 3080 with 16GB of VRAM; support for at least 64 GB of RAM; and an 11th-gen 8-core i7+ processor

My new Gigabyte Aorus 15P YD laptop--one of the few I found that met my rather stringent requirements I spend more time on my laptop than I care to admit, and I planned to use my next laptop for a number of processor- and graphics-intensive tasks, such as 8K video editing; playing Microsoft Flight Simulator …