Hi. I'm Ed Holsinger, I do data things.

Who I am

I'm a cheery, optimistic, somewhat shy human who lives in sunny Long Beach, California with my lovely wife Maria and two cats. I have a beard. I also have a mustache. They work independently. I'm pretty firmly a cat person.

I studied English, Psychology and Linguistics at university. I did this for a sufficiently long time that it qualifies as a part of who I am. I have degrees in all of these things, but mostly Linguistics. I have a Ph.D in that.

I spend a lot of time thinking about data, engineering and science and sometimes data science and data engineering, whatever that is. I like teaching. I enjoy writing. I love building things that solve problems.

I have a soft spot for games, particularly tabletop games, both playing them and designing them.

I also like to hike, and do so as often as I can.

What I do

I'm a data engineer, if you're not entirely clear on what that means, don't worry. My job, generally speaking is to transmute data into information. Like some kind of data alchemist. This is what I like to think.

In practice, I spend most of my day wrangling, analyzing and mining various types of structured and unstructured data, trying to make sense of and extract valuable insights from that data, and building software and systems that provide automation for all of this so that everyone can go solve some new problem.

Why I write

I started this blog to have a place to write about what I'm doing and interesting things. We'll see what happens.

I also hope that at some point, something that I post here will be of use to someone. Engineering is an inherently social enterprise. If anything I produce can save someone a few extra moments on their way to solving some interesting problem, then I'm doing something right.

What I know

I'm great at data mining, including statstical analysis, nlp and machine learning.

I'm an expert python developer. I'm okay with scala and go.

I know a lot about a lot of data platforms. I have extensive experience with the hadoop ecosystem, spark, elasticsearch, mongo, redis as well as garden variety sql databases.

I'm pretty into automation and dev-ops. I have a love-hate relationship with airflow. I've spent a lot of time writing bash and fabric scripts for infrastructure automation. I'm fond of cloud platforms, and have experience with heroku, aws and openshift, though I'm particularly fond of google cloud platform. I've spent a lot of time building systems with docker and kubernetes.

I'm an amazing public speaker, or so I've been told. I also have a bunch of other skills, if you're super interested check out my profile on LinkedIn.