Nearly every project I work on has Markdown documentation with Github’s exstensions for things like code highlighting. Unfortunately,I’m not super-great at remembering how the syntax goes, which results in commit messages like “l2md” when I push and realize the mistake I’ve made.

One benefit of using Julia for playing with statistics is that it’s a modern, usable language for general purposes as well. Earlier I built a k-Nearest Neighbor classifier for predicting crime from the data on hbg-crime.org, so I thought it would be fun to build a web service in Julia that could return those results.

In Clojure, I frequently use org.joda.time via clj-time as a much nicer alternative to the java.util.* classes. But since transit doesn’t have a built-in encoder to write JodaTime types as dates, I had to write my own. It took a bit of digging through transit-clj to figure out how, but it’s pretty simple.

One thing I’ve wanted to visualize from the hbg-crime.org dataset is what times of day have the most and least crime, in which parts of the city. Using the Gadfly plotting package with Julia makes that easy.

Update: