Welcome to my small outpost on the internet. Below you can read a bit about me, find some examples of my personal projects, and learn how to get in touch.

About

By trade, I work as a software and data engineer in the media industry. I like munging messy data, feel at home on the command line, and write a lot of Python.

My background, however, is in journalism. I was a reporter for over a decade, covering different beats. I wrote about politics and society in South Korea; trade and economic policy in Washington D.C.; and high-stakes litigation in Silicon Valley.

To learn more about my work history, view my résumé here.

Programming is something I enjoy both at and outside of work. I try to keep a couple personal projects in the hopper, and take an interest in different programming languages and operating systems. I'm passionate about free and open source software, and can get pretty jazzed discussing things like text editors and window managers.

When I'm not writing code or wrangling data, I enjoy reading (mostly history and travel writing), cycling, and spending time outdoors with my family. I'm also interested in natural human languages; I speak Korean and am currently stumbling through French.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Selected Projects

• Ancient Places Country Search (Golang, PostGIS)
• Bay Area Pandemic Dashboard OpenDB (Python, Datasette)
• Python in the Newsroom: A talk I gave in 2019 about using Python tools to make journalistic analysis transparent

Contact

You can reach me by email at mail@benghancock.com

I'm benghancock on GitHub.