I made five maps for the 2022 #30DayMapChallenge and had a lot of fun. They all seem to involved some cool satellite imagery or use 3D in a way that I wanted to try out.

Sometimes you need a map for even the shortest hikes or bike rides. (I’ve gotten lost on extremely well-used trails.) I use the Strava and Gaia apps, but I wanted something simpler. Way simpler.

In 2018, prior to the outset of the new Governor Mike Dunleavy administration, I wanted to see how the oil markets had been for each of Alaska’s governors on a relative basis. We were ~four years into cheap oil. I indexed the price of oil (monthly data) to their first day in office and saw who took the elevator up and who rode it down. So I made this plot:

**TL:DR, I made an rmarkdown site tracking Alaska’s early and mail vote as ballots arrived each day in October/November 2020.

The 2020 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race will be remembered as the year the coronavirus upended the final days of the race and saw checkpoints lock down as the race finished in Nome. But it will also go down as of the most unforgiving for mushers: of the 57 mushers who began the race in Willow, 22 scratched and went home early.

The 2019 fire season has been destructive and long-lasting. More than 2.5 million acres have been burned across 707 fires as of September 9, 2019, according to the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center .

From 1983 to 2015, every woman, man, kid, and baby received an Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend check with an amount calculated by a 1982 law. It was rarely questioned publicly until the last five years because of ample petroleum revenues and several years of cushion thanks to the billions in the Constitutional Budget Reserve (now just fumes.)

When March arrives in Alaska, there are two things on everyone’s mind:

The government spends billions of dollars per year on a dizzying array of gear and specialized services: office furniture, cloud computing, breakfast cereal, and advanced weapons systems are among destinations of taxpayer funds. I created a project to explore how a half-trillion dollars of federal funds go to Washington D.C. contractors and competitors in 50 states.

Like any government bureaucracy, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Detention Compliance and Removals Office buys a a variety of supplies to run their detention facilities and maintain their offices. In light of public attention on the agency, I built a small tool to explore the millions of dollars in contracts.