My favorite video game over the past two years has undoubtedly been Apex Legends; a free-to-play cross platform battle royale-style fighting game where teams of three compete to be the last team standing before the ring closes and eliminates all players. While a simple concept, the game tests players’ ability to communicate, work as a team, and think outside of the box. To have the best chance of being the last team standing, throughout the game, players pick up different weapons, shields, and attachments. Apex offers players a chance to purchase higher-tier items from the Replicator using crafting materials that you collect during each round. Items in the Replicator are constantly being change which allows for game play to be fun and fresh. However, not all loot in the Replicator is worthwhile to purchase or exciting to use. Until this point, the only way to know what items are in the Replicator is to play the game and access the Replicator to check. Imagine having to go to a restaurant to view the menu and not being able to view the menu online. How would you decide if you even wanted to go to the restaurant. This is what the Replicator is like. This blog post is intended to walk readers through a solution I built that provides Apex players worldwide a feed that displays information about what loot is available in the Replicator each day.

Imagine a world in which you never have to copy and paste values, tables, and charts into a presentation again. Google Workspace Solutions takes this concept and turns it into reality. REST APIs make it easy to programmatically interact with your Google Workspace and automate tasks with simple code. By developing a Python script that integrates with Google Drive, Sheets, and Slides, I am able to automate the report creation process that is usually performed manually by data analysts or account managers. This post will walk you through how you can leverage Google Developer Tools to automate your reporting and save valuable time for your organization.

Untappd is a mobile application that allows users to keep track of what beers they’ve tried and what they thought of it by checking in a beer and rating it. You can explore nearby popular bars, breweries, and beers, look up ratings for beers you’re interested in trying, and you can even see what your friends are drinking. Since I downloaded Untappd in June 2019, I’ve logged 133 unique beers across 49 different breweries in 12 different states. Using an export of my Untappd profile, I generated a heat map to share with you some of my favorite breweries to date; Brix City (NJ), Burlington (VT), Other Half (NY), Finback (NY).

A $100 DraftKings referral bonus and casino promo later, I find myself in a GroupMe group chat with some of my close friends who love to gamble on sports. The daily discussions and debates are speculative and anecdotal about which NBA players and teams are going to cover the spread. Personally, I’m not the biggest sports fan or the most knowledgable about sports; however, I do know a lot about probability and statistics. My friends’ methods for determining what would be winning bets did not sit well with me and I often found myself shaking my head in disapproval. Shortly after joining their GroupMe chat, I set out to create a tool for the boys that would help guide their discussions and influence their betting strategy using data. In this three part series, Betting with the Boys, I’ll walk you through my the development and implementation of my solution. This post (Part 1) will detail how I obtain NBA odds from DraftKings and how I enhance the data with the last five game NBA player averages from basketball.realgm.com. Part 2 will describe how I created a GroupMe bot that sends daily DraftKings odds and player stats to my friends group chat. Lastly, Part 3 will be outline how I scheduled this script to run automatically, providing a daily summary the group chat.

On June 26th, 2020, Gap Inc. announced a collaboration between its namesake brand and Kanye West's Yeezy apparel label. Under Kanye’s creative direction, the Yeezy design studio is to develop the new line to deliver modern, elevated basics for men, women, and kids at accessible price points that will sell in Gap stores and on its website starting in 2021. Being the sneaker head and hypebeast that I am, I knew that this was an opportunity to not only buy into the hype, but make an investment. It seems like everything that Kanye has released or collaborated on in the past few years has been in especially high demand. Since Kanye joined Adidas back in 2013, Adidas went from generating 14.8 billion euros in sales to 16.9 billion euros in 2015, which was when Kanye released his first Adidas sneaker, the Adidas Yeezy 750 Boost in February 2015. In this post I’ll illustrate how Adidas’ stock price increases with releases and re-releases of Adidas Yeezy footwear, as evidence to show why I think investing in Gap is a good long term stock hold.

Playboi Carti landed his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 album chart, on Christmas Day, with the long awaited release of Whole Lotta Red. The rapper’s second studio album had 100,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Dec. 31, 2020, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. Whole Lotta Red, which was first announced in 2018, boasts 24 tracks and guest stars Future, Kid Cudi and Kanye West (who also executive-produced the album). I’m a big fan Carti’s previous album (Die Lit) and features, and I even paid to go see him live in concert (which was a terrible experience and a story for another time). With that being said, I was just plain saddened by this album. To me, it felt like there was just not enough substance or variety and the Yeah and What ad-libs at the end of almost every line diluted the album, so much so, that I used my Python skills to prove it. You may be surprised to learn that 6.7% of all words on this Billboard No. 1 album is WHAT. In this post, I’ll show you how I calculated this share and how I generated a WordCloud album cover using Genius Lyric’s API to uncover the album’s most common words.

On December 12, 2020 a 1999 1st Edition Charizard reportedly sold for $369,000 at the Goldin Auctions. If true, that would make it the new record holder for the most expensive Pokemon card ever sold. Since 2018, TCG (trading card game) prices have been skyrocketing, and I wanted to get in on the action. To get some great deals on cards, there is no better place to look than Craigslist (hopefully for a mother off-loading her son’s childhood collection for the low ). To ensure I know about new TCG listings in my area, I created a web scraping tool that searches Craigslist for new Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh, and Magic the Gathering postings and sends an email summary of all the new listings. This post will describe in detail how I developed the tool.