sharla gelfand

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hi, i'm sharla! i'm a freelance developer specializing in data science workflows and data visualization, and i dabble in front-end dev (can you tell)? i mostly use R, and love open source.

if you want to discuss working together, please email me: sharla gelfand at gmail

opendatatoronto.R

1 # the {opendatatoronto} R package interfaces with the city of toronto's open data portal

2 # learn more: sharlagelfand.github.io/opendatatoronto

4 install.packages("opendatatoronto")

6 library(opendatatoronto)

mermaidr.R

1 # {mermaidr} is an R package that enables you to access data from MERMAID, an open-source data platform developed to help collect, analyze, and share coral reef monitoring data

2 # learn more: github.com/data-mermaid/mermaidr

3 devtools::install_github("data-mermaid/mermaidr")

5 library(mermaidr)

an earnest 2021 update

i am officially ~done work~ for 2021 and thought i might do a wrap up! 2021 was my second full year freelancing and it was a busy one. in case you're wondering what a year in the life of an "R and Shiny developer" is like, here are some projects i worked on this year:

Low-end of Market Rental Monitor (LEMR), a proof of concept Shiny app that links + displays housing data to show how the supply of affordable rental is changing over time (with Purpose Analytics, as part of CMHC's housing supply challenge)
datamations, an R package for automatically visualizing tidyverse pipelines (with Microsoft Research)
MODEL-AD Explorer, a Shiny app for exploring gene expression and pathology data from mouse models of Alzheimer's disease (with Sage Bionetworks / the MODEL-AD consortium)
mermaidr, an R package for extracting data from MERMAID, a platform for aggregating and managing data on coral reef health

this year was very, very Shiny + front-end dev heavy, and i expect next year will be too. i definitely ramped up on CSS (still learning - right now mainly through Josh Comeau's course), started learning about accessibility (obviously v important, and very underserved in Shiny), and worked with legit amazing people on every project.

besides client work, i did a lot of community, personal, and professional dev work, like:

serving on the leadership board of Data Science by Design, which hosted a Creator Conference in the spring, has an anthology coming up, spawned 2 book clubs (i read Data Feminism and gave up on Design Justice) and from which #RecreationThursday was born
getting RStudio instructor certified
reviewing Mastering Shiny
giving exactly one talk
maintaining opendatatoronto (old news) and ckanr (new to me)
creating lots and lots of digital art (my gradients rabbithole was fun)
making this here website (see: front-end dev)
writing one blog post about CSS + shiny
learning D3 at one point? i forgot that was this year. i abandoned it but i did it for a while okay
taking part in a data viz membership program for people wanting to grow data design skills (slowly but surely finding my style!)

last year i tweeted bragging about how little i worked, but this year that was definitely not the case:

A hand-drawn data visualization showing the number of hours worked per work, broken down into client work, community, open source, personal projects, etc. Most of the weeks show 20+ hours, with April to September almost exclusively showing 30-40 hours, except for one week off in July. The work drops off in October to December, averaging 5-15 hours per week.

i took on way too much and am definitely burnt out 🙃. even though the last few months have been pretty chill, i'm still feeling the effects of working basically full time + non-stop from april straight to the end of september. covid is seemingly neverending. i went through a huge breakup in early august and took off one day only:

A hand-drawn data visualization showing the number of GitHub commits per day, in various shades of blue. It shows work almost all year, except for a week off in July and one in October. There is mainly no work done on weekends, but a lot on weekdays. The exception is September 1, which is empty, and circled in red.

which is just not the vibe.

on the plus side, i made nearly 2x as much as i did in 2020 🤑. i'm just almost about to meet my goal of 24 books read this year, i'm gay, i listened to 15 hours of fleetwood mac's "dreams" alone, i visited my parents for the first time since covid started (you see that week off in july?), and i have really great friends.

i am (hopefully) pretty full up on work for 2022 already, which is a ~blessing. i hope to get back down to the 15-20 hours of work that i flexed about last year, and have more time for learning + growing, plus just deadass not working.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

xoxo,
sharla