I am a PhD candidate in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. I have been working mostly on getting a lot of heterogenous data into a format that would let me investigate it… To do this, I departed from the land of MATLAB and tiny datafiles and landed in the land of Databases (both SQL and some NoSQL), R, Python. And I’ve had a lot of fun so far. I am looking forward to doing more with open source tools in my quest to help people get insight into data and the patterns that may be arising.