On Growth

There are many times when growth isn't really recognized until you stop and reflect on the past week, month, or even year.

To me it is exciting when you can see your own growth in real time, doing something you once wouldn’t have known or thought to do.

I've had a a few of those moments recently, and I wanted to share.

I was creating a provider footprint map, and something didn't look right. When I investigated further, I was missing entire layers of data! Something didn't get downloaded quite right. I was so proud of myself in the moment for being able to look at my map and think 'Something's missing,' rather than have it pointed out by someone later. I was able to remedy the missing data with a new download and no one will ever be the wiser (unless they're reading this). Check out this provider map for the far western counties of North Carolina that I built.

Another instance, and much more frustrating, was realizing that the GEOIDs for a whole state from a federal, national dataset was concatenated differently. I originally thought it was wrong, but we'll get to that later. I thought I had fixed this issue already (assuming it was an error I made over a year ago that I could easily remedy now). When visualizing this data, I noticed that I was missing Connecticut. So I re-downloaded, re-joined, re-calculated, and got thrown a curveball that sidetracked my mission to remedy the disappearance of Connecticut.

Fast forward a couple of months, and I'm trying to finish this data fix. After much consternation and frustration, I made a realization: the problem wasn't me, it was the data itself. It seems that Connecticut uses regional planning codes rather than county codes, so their GEOIDs are concatenated using that regional code, meaning they don't match up to the TIGERLINE files available for the census tract. Further research in the next few days revealed that this change was in 2022, so any data after that date collected by Connecticut will have the new GEOIDs.

Luckily, knowing how the GEOIDs are formed means I was able to extract what I needed to correctly join the data and get my analysis back on track. It's a lot easier said than done, however, as this analysis was part of the foundation of a much larger dataset that I now must go through and update as well. Yes - I am trying to document and script these things, but the first time (or two, or three) are pretty hands-on as I get these things figured out and get the details just right.

These moments of noticing my growth are little sparks of joy and motivation to keep going.

Do you have a moment of noticing your growth? Feel free to share.