Hi, I’m James Watkins. I’m originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, but I currently live on Vancouver Island and after seven or so years
I've somehow found my way back here (my heart's still on the Island, though).
I studied sociology at the University of Victoria where I completed a B.A. (Hons) and M.A.
Most of my projects were oriented toward gerontology and demography, but I’m always looking to apply my skills and expertise elsewhere!
I have many years experience using Stata, SAS, and SPSS for statistical analysis. I dabble in Python, JavaScript, and R for hobbyist applications (some of which you might find on this site), but I'm increasingly using these languages for serious analytic and visualization work, too. I like to use Plotly to make pretty (and sometimes interactive) visualizations—or Datawrapper if I'm feeling lazy. I like to mess around with GIS, but I consider myself a newbie on that front. I also help my 5-year-old daughter create animations using Scratch Jr (mostly fish races). We even built a Discord bot together using JavaScript!
On the hardware side, I typically use the Arduino and Raspbery Pi platforms for electronics and IoT projects. I like to take things apart and learn about them, or scavenge spare parts. Recently I’ve experimented with LCD transparency, electrochromic materials, and image projection onto glass. I build and maintain the desktop computers in my household. My homelab doesn’t consist of much at the moment: ‘production’ includes Plex, game servers, and some Ubiquiti network gear; ‘development’ consists of some old enterprise network equipment, a Raspberry Pi, and an old laptop. But hey, I’ll get there eventually.
I also do some amateur astronomy. In the summer of 2018 I saw Jupiter’s four visible moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto) and Saturn’s rings with my own eyes for the first time. I’m currently using a pair of binoculars and a Celestron AstroMaster 130 Newtonian reflector telescope. I’m beginning to dabble in astrophotography, but I’m not very good at it yet. I like to keep up with dwarf planet and exoplanet news, and I chart nearby star systems in 3D.
My favourite authors include J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
My favourite poets are Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves.
My favourite social theorists are Zygmunt Bauman and Pierre Bourdieu.
About this site
This site was originally conceived in 2015, but went offline after a year - I simply felt I didn’t have much use for a permanent online presence and had better things to be doing (e.g. grad school). Instead, when I felt like sharing a project or write-up, I’d inundate a small Discord community of interested people with messages. At some point I realized that Discord is not a great way to store work permanently. Thus, this site.
Inaugurated June 19, 2019. Facelift August 14, 2021.
This site was built by yours truly, using pure HTML (previously Jekyll on Ruby),
Bulma CSS, and a little jQuery & vanilla JavaScript to soften the edges.
I use the KaTeX JavaScript library for LaTeX math typesetting.
I use highlight.js for syntax highlighting in code snippets.
Hosting provided by GitHub Pages.
See the source code here.