dvirlar2 / dvirlar2.github.io

Personal website built using Quarto!

Hey there! 👋
I'm Daphne Virlar-Knight

Project Manager at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

🔥 What do I actually do?

Currently at NCEAS, I manage two nascent projects: (1) Creating an index of community resilience to wildfire across the Western U.S. and Canada, and (2) quantifying the amount of digital tools used to remotely collect information across ecosystems. My role is to make sure these projects go from "neat concept" to "viable product" within a two-year time period, and without letting the scope creep out of control.

✍️ Experience

• 2024 - Present: Sustainability Consultant (Spirit Consultants)
• 2023 - 2024: Project Manager (NCEAS)
• 2022 - 2023: Projects Data Coordinator (NCEAS)
• 2020 - 2021: Environmental Planner (Rincon Consultants)

🤓 Education

• 2020: Master of Environmental Science and Management (Bren School, UC Santa Barbara)
• 2017: Bachelor of Arts; Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (University of Colorado Boulder)

🧐 Socials

• 💻 dvirlar2.github.io is my personal website.
• 🐦 You can find me on twitter here: @dvirlar2.
• 💬 You can also find me on LinkedIn

dvirlar2.github.io's Issues

Fonts Issue

The H2 fonts are all bolded and heavy when I render the website to view changes. I haven't been able to figure out the font issues yet, but these .scss files from Sam might be helpful:

1. MEDS program: customizing-quarto-websites/meds_styles.scss
2. Sam's personal website: samanthacsik.github.io/styles.scss
3. New Openscapes sites: website-new/styles.scss

Project Idea: LobStars in Python

Re-create lobstars assignment from Allison's 206 class, but in python (oooOOooOOO, how fun) and compare the code. Learning python has been a little boring without what feels like an applicable use case, so maybe this is a good mini lesson in data cleaning, wrangling, and visualization.

Lobster data is from LTER site in Santa Barbara Channel

Blog Idea: Adding GP to Website

Oct 18, 2022: currently in progress in development branch

Blog Idea: Github Actions & Website Deployment

Create either a blog page or quick tidbit on how to use Github Actions to automatically deploy the website

Blog Idea: How I Figured Out Trestles Template

Feature: Add Footer to Website

Blog Idea: linear vs logistic regression

• Explain differences between the two regression types
• give example use case scenarios
• code these scenarios

Blog Idea: Package Development in Practice

Maybe make a blog post out of how I edited the eml::get_raster() function, and how I wrote tests

Create new quarto website!

Blog Post Idea: My Journey to Data Science

Maybe write up a little story of how I went from pre-med engineering to ecology to data science. Mostly for my own enjoyment, but also because it's important to show that progress isn't always linear!

Enhancement: Python For Loop

• Use quarto tabsets to show R and Python code for the post on how to write a for loop.
• Write instructions on how to write a for loop in python

Should probably create an actual CV, rather than just a resume

CV would ideally have:

• speaking things (talk at winter RAP retreat, panel for admitted students day both years at Bren, stuff like that)
• teaching assistantships, whether formal or informal (TA for engineering projects course, helper for Sam's troubleshooting quarto workshop)
• actual positions like NCWIT, Rincon, and NCEAS (and I guess Dangermond Internship)
• research assistant positions (Nancy and Sarah)
• volunteer positions & extra-curriculars (DAC (Dean's Advisory Council), The Herd (both as a member and as president & de-facto president), hosted virtual trivia night and had a great turn out for bren community in early pandemic, part of Data Science Chats (nceas coding club) and helped build website and teach folks.... I want to say quarto, but that doesn't sound quite right. Also commencement speaker!)
• some kind of honorable mention (maybe?) where I talk about how I helped tutor people in R when we first started at Bren, and how I am consistently a resource for my peers and friends outside of my field when they need help with their code
• lols, an education section. You know. Where I explain my silly little degrees. Maybe certificates too, but that's fuzzy

Useful tools online

For creating a file tree diagram: https://tree.nathanfriend.io/. I used this when I needed to create a mock diagram of a folder structure that didn't exist yet

Mermaid Diagrams: Mermaid.Live. Comes with examples, and is a live-editor so you can build things out first before putting in a git issue

Carbon for creating really pretty code snippets

Blog Idea: How To Use Color Scheme of Another Theme

Brief write-up of how I got the superhero theme colors, but kept the underlying yeti theme

Project Idea: Create data viz for My Favorite Murder

• Visualize the change in ratings per 100 episodes to see how podcast ratings have changed over time
• Highlight the most listened to or highly rated episode out of each "season" (100 episodes)

Project Idea: Create Bob's Burgers Dataset

Dataset would be created by web-scrpaing imdb for all episodes to see their rankings
Note: Also get information from the movie

Columns from web-scraping:

• Episode Number
• Season Number
• Rating

Columns to add:

• Holiday Episode (column would be binary, yes/no)
• Holiday (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentines Day)
• Musical_Number (column would be binary, yes/no)
• Song_Name (name of song in episode; multiple rows of same episode would be required for episodes with more than one song in them)
• Song_Popularity (pull number of plays from Spotify, and
• Main_Characters (which character the episode is mainly focused or centered on. When it's all three children, == "Belcher Kids"; when it's truly centered around the whole family == "Belcher Family"); (allow for multiple MCs. Useful for when there's conflict between two characters, such as Bob vs Hugo, Bob & Teddy)
• Episode_Characters (Number of named characters per episode)
• Characters_in_Episode ?

Questions to ask/visualize:

• Ratings over time
• Average rating per season
• Favorite musical numbers (gathered from spotify; number of plays), facet-wrapped by seasons
• Best musical number from each season
• Does the number of characters per episode predict the rankings?
• Does the number of musical numbers predict the show ranking, outside of the finales? Including the finales?

Project Idea: Upgraded LobStars

Re-create lobstars assignment from Allison's 206 class, but make it prettier and maybe a little interactive

Resource Page

I've been thinking for a while I want to add a page to my site that includes a bunch of resources that I've found helpful, or that I want to "save" and refer to later. Sam did that in her re-modeled website (code here). Will continue to look at for inspiration 🥳