Powerballers
I don’t talk a lot on here about what my day job is… partly because I don’t want to get dooced, and partly because it may not be interesting to a lot of people. But for purposes of what I’m about to discuss, here’s a short and sweet version:
I do reporting for the Cisco Networking Academy Program. We have a lot of data and when people want to know something about that data, they come to us. Diving into the data to figure out how to find what the people want, and how to accurately get it is part of what I do. The other part is designing and building web-based frontends for the people to look at their data in the way they want to.
I’ve been at my job for just over two years now, and I’ve learned a lot about data analysis. It’s actually fun for me now — drowning myself in data and pulling interesting nuggets out of it.
Those of you who live in states with the Powerball game may remember a couple months ago when the jackpot reached $215 million. Now I don’t play the lottery, but the large jackpot got me interested. And the analyze-the-data mindset I’ve developed at my job over the years led me to find all the historical data on the Powerball game, load it into a database, and see what I could find out.
Turns out there’s all sorts of neat things to be discovered. Like the fact that no winning number combination has ever been drawn more than once (in fact, the same series of five white balls has never been drawn more than once). These are the kinds of things I totally geek out on playing with, and the more I played around with the data, the more I realized I needed a tool to poke and prod at it — rather than writing SQL by hand.
So I give you: Powerballers. Built using Ruby On Rails, I was able to develop it in record time. I don’t expect the site to be a big thing, but it was a heck of a lot of fun to develop and hopefully others find it interesting and maybe useful as well.
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