I'm Marvin.

I build creative things for web & mobile. Here's some of my work.

MasterClass

This was a proof-of-concept iOS app that I worked on with a friend of mine. Our belief was that most people would be delighted to share their skills or knowledge with the world. We wanted to build a tool to reduce the overhead of running these small, niche classes, thereby making the knowledge transfer process much simpler. Think Airbnb for classes and courses.

The home screen, showing a list of available classes.
The single class screen provides users with further details and entices them to join a class.

Flights

As a frequent traveller for work and leisure, I use TripIt to manage all my itineraries. After discovering that my data was available through their API, I embarked on a fun project to learn more about my travel patterns.

I wrote a Python script to extract all my flight data (from 2015 to the present) and then used various data science tools like pandas and matplotlib to make sense of it. These are some of my results.

390,157
Miles flown
862
Hours in flight
141
Flights
47.5%
International
My US domestic flights on a map My international flights on a map

Although the output dataset was relatively small (approximately 100KB), it contained a surprising amount of insight. For example, I discovered that I would often visit the same handful of destinations and typically got there on a Star Alliance airline. These are some of the charts I made to visualize the results.

I flew into 29 airports

Excludes departure airports (i.e., only count the arrival airport for each flight)
  • Newark Liberty International Airport
    36 Flights
  • San Francisco International Airport
    33 Flights
  • London Heathrow Airport
    11 Flights
  • Singapore Changi Airport
    7 Flights
  • John F Kennedy International Airport
    7 Flights
  • Frankfurt am Main International Airport
    6 Flights
  • Christchurch International Airpor
    6 Flights
  • Toulouse-Blagnac Airport
    5 Flights
  • ... and 21 more

I flew with 13 different airlines

For codeshare flights, I used the operating airline, not the marketing airline.
  • United Airlines
    65 Flights
  • Virgin America
    19 Flights
  • Singapore Airlines
    15 Flights
  • Lufthansa
    10 Flights
  • Air Canada
    6 Flights
  • Delta Air Lines
    6 Flights
  • Air New Zealand
    5 Flights
  • British Airways
    5 Flights
  • ... and 5 more

I flew on 16 types of aircraft

This data came from the respective airlines and excluded equipment changes.
  • Airbus A320
    31 Flights
  • Boeing 757
    27 Flights
  • Boeing 777
    24 Flights
  • Boeing 767
    11 Flights
  • Boeing 737
    10 Flights
  • Airbus A380
    8 Flights
  • Embraer 175
    6 Flights
  • Embraer ERJ
    6 Flights
  • ... and 8 more

About Me

I'm a designer/front-end developer who lives in New York City.

I currently work at Palantir, building incredible software to fight human trafficking, financial fraud and other difficult problems. Previously, I did UI design at Foodspotting, a San Francisco-based startup that was eventually acquired by OpenTable. Prior to that, I kickstarted several e-commerce projects in South-East Asia.

Having lived in 4 different cities over the last 10 years, I've come to value experiences over possessions. In my free time, I enjoy mindful meditation, trying new resturants and running by the river (when the temperature's just right). During the weekends, I'm also a sound engineer at Hillsong NYC.

Contact Me

I'm not currently looking for work, but feel free to reach out on social media. I love connecting with people who are working on meaningful things.

© 2018. Handcrafted in New York City.