About Me
Hi, I’m Ben. By trade, I work as a software and data engineer in the media industry. I like munging messy data, feel at home on the command line, and write a lot of Python.
My background, however, is in journalism. I was a reporter for over a decade, covering different beats. I wrote about politics and society in South Korea; trade and economic policy in Washington D.C.; and high-stakes litigation in Silicon Valley.
Programming is something I enjoy both at and outside of work. I try to keep a couple personal projects in the hopper, and take an interest in different programming languages and operating systems. I’m passionate about free and open source software, and can get pretty jazzed discussing things like text editors and window managers.
When I’m not writing code or wrangling data, I enjoy reading (mostly history and travel writing), cycling, and spending time outdoors with my family. I’m also interested in natural human languages; I speak Korean and have at various points studied Japanese, Mandarin, and French.
The Blog
Delimiter collision is what happens when a character that is used to separate fields in a data file – i.e. a table or a spreadsheet – winds up in one of the data fields itself, causing a parsing error.
I chose the term for the name of my blog not only because I write about data, but because it’s an apt analogy for modern life: We struggle to keep things in tidy little boxes that we can make sense of, and yet so often find ourselves wading through the garbled mess of reality.
Contact
There’s no comments feature on this blog. If you’d like to get in touch, please write me an email. I can be reached at:
mail (at) benghancock (dot) com