About me

Some things about me, myself and I.

Hello! 👋

My name is Frie¹, I’m a data scientist / low-budget data engineer² / coding person from Germany. Until the end of 2021, I work as COO for CorrelAid, a data4good network of over 1500 data scientists where I am in charge of our project coordination and developing tools and maintaining our technical infrastructure. In addition, I (co-)organize educational events such as the CorrelCon, the monthly Open Online Data Meetup and the biweekly CorrelAid tidytuesday coding hangout. Before that, I studied political science and data science and worked in IT consulting for two years. Besides that, I also enjoy being outdoors (hiking, exploring), being indoors (being lazy), taking photos of things and eating good food. I am quite active on Twitter, so feel free to follow me there.

You can find out about some of my projects under the projects menu.

My pronouns are they/them in English, sie/ihr³ or er/ihm in German.

Skills and interests

• R for data related work: I have been using R since 2014 and whenever it makes sense, I use it for my projects. I mostly develop R packages and write RMarkdown reports for internal use at CorrelAid, automate boring stuff I am too lazy for (see my blog and the R projects page), collect data via APIs or webscraping and juggle around data with the tidyverse stack. Since autumn 2020, I also participate in #tidytuesday (see the CorrelAid tidytuesday blog) and have some experience with developing Shiny apps.
• Python for backend development and data science applications. I heavily used Python for (data science) backend development at codecentric and it’s still my go-to if I have to develop things like APIs (e.g. with fastapi).
• Git: first rule of programming: always use version control. I also like teaching Git.
• Docker: second rule of programming: always dockerize. Rule 2a.: Use docker-compose.
• GitHub actions / GitLab CI/CD: I enjoy automating things. Of course, I use CI/CD for standard use cases such as running the tests for my R packages but I also abuse it in various other ways, e.g. to notify me about failure on a Raspberry Pi :)
• Node.js: I have experience working with Node.js from a project at codecentric and from developing a Slackbot for CorrelAid.
• Vue.js: I’m not a very good frontend dev but I can build small things in Vue.js - thanks to Jan Dix for teaching me! For example, together with Jan and as part of a CorrelAid project, I co-developed a database and “assessment” for a Swiss NPO promoting job options in the sustainability field.
• AWS Lambda and serverless: I have used AWS Lambda + serverless for a project at codecentric and the Slackbot for CorrelAid.
• Unix/Linux and Shell scripting
• Elastic stack: I have used the Elastic stack in two projects at codecentric.
• server admin: as the main “sysadmin” for CorrelAid, I have experience with setting up and maintaining virtual machines and deploying applications on them using tools like Docker, Nginx and traefik. For example, I have deployed pad.correlaid.org which I also integrated with Azure AD.

Follow me

• friep
• friep
• ameisen_strasse⁴
• Frie Preu
• friep

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1. Pronounced like the word “free” if you were wondering. Yeah, that made for some funny situations during my Erasmus year in the UK.↩︎

2. I heavily use GitHub actions, R and all sorts of other shenanigans to automate data-related processes. It’s all on a small scale but I really enjoy this sort of work.↩︎

3. Fellow German speakers: me using sie/ihr in German does not mean you can use she/her pronouns in English for me. That’s not how it works! Please respect my pronouns when talking in English! Thank you. :)↩︎

4. “ant route” (literally “ant street”) in German. 🐜 The story behind that is that I’m highly uncreative and when I created my Twitter account I was laying on my bed and there was an “ant street” next to my bedstand. Yes, really. It was 2013 and I was living in the basement of a Berlin family during my internship.↩︎