iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 02/09/2026

A while back, I looked at how the top 20 podcasts in Science on Apple Podcasts change each week, which made me wonder which category changed the most. It turns out the top 25 podcasts in Comedy and News are the most stable, while True Crime and Society & Culture are the least stable.

A chart with title of "Which Apple Podcasts Category Charts Has The Most Stable Top 25 Podcasts Over an 8-Week Period" with a subtitle of "A look a the number of unique podcasts that appeared in the top 25 podcasts in a given category over the 8-week period. Fewer unique podcasts means the category is more stable". The chart shows Comedy, News, and Religion categories as being most stable and True Crime, Music, and Society & Culture as categories that are least stable.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 19/05/2026

I updated my analysis of Congressional ages relative to population ages to use the current Congress and the latest Census Bureau data, and the gap has grown a little. The median age of Congress is 60. The median age of the US is 39. That's a 21-year gap. #DataAnalysis #USPolitics #Congress

US State map showing the difference between the median age of Congress members representing a state and that state's population median age. Some of the states with the biggest differences are Idaho, Vermont, Wyoming, and West Virginia; some of the states with the smallest differences are Colorado, Indiana, New Hampshire, and New Mexico.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 16/04/2026

I wondered how much podcast rankings change in a category over time. Ran an Apple Podcasts scraper for a bit and created a bump chart to check. It turns out that the top few podcasts in the Science category are fairly stable, but the rest of the rankings change quite a bit. #Podcast #DataAnalysis

Bump chart title "Apple Podcasts Charts Weekly Ranking Changes for Science Podcasts in US". Show positions 1 to 20 from January 11th to March 8th. The top 5 or 6 places are mostly stable but 7 to 15 have bigger changes and 16+ have new podcasts almost every week.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 07/04/2026

I finally got around to Echoes of Wisdom. I’m loving the design and charm in this and the Link’s Awakening remake. Hope they make another game in this engine.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 18/02/2026

A chord diagram is a fun way to visualize connections. It can show both which values are most connected & which have the fewest/most connections. In a recent post, I walked through creating a chord diagram using Holoviews from a dataframe. Check it out: frankcorso.me/chord-diagra...

Chord diagram showing the connections of various Pokémon types to each other for Pokémon with 2 types. Shows a lot of connections between Normal type and Flying type. Grass, Flying, Poison, Bug, and Water have some of the most connections, while Ice, Fire, and Electric have some of the fewest connections.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 16/02/2026

Now that GNV Tech Chats has >200 Meetup members, I want to build a presence outside Meetup to make it easier to find, and have an email newsletter that includes other tech events around town. Spending some time today creating the basic landing page for it: gnvtechchats.com #GNV #Gainesville

Top of the page on the new GNV Tech Chats website. Says "Where Gainesville's tech community connects" with a description of "Connect with developers, designers, AI engineers, and tech enthusiasts. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, you belong here."

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 06/02/2026

I am working on a new guide for creating scatterplots with the Python Seaborn package and thought I'd use a Fortune 500 dataset for the examples. I was curious to see how revenue compares against the number of employees. #DataAnalysis

Scatterplot with title of Revenue vs Number of Employees for Fortune 500. The number of employees goes 0 to over 400,000 and revenue goes 0 to over 400 billion dollars in USD. Some of the outliers are labelled, such as Target and Home Depot having higher employees but only mid-range of revenue with CVS, Alphabet, Apple, and Exxon Mobile having much higher revenue with fewer employees.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 14/01/2026

Apparently, Meetup now displays ads in any emails from their platform. An event attendee for GNV Tech Chats sent me this screenshot of a scammy-type ad in the email that announced the new event I just scheduled.

Email form Meetup that says GNV Tech Chats scheduled a new event. But, the entire top half of the view is a large ad that says "Wrap Aluminum Foil Around Your Feet, Here's Why".

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 04/01/2026

I really like how some nonfiction books are starting to include comics in them. I am reading Out of Your Mind by @dwaynegodwin.bsky.social and @phdcomics.com and there are comics throughout each chapter and some comic interludes. #Booksky 🧪🧠

A page in a book with a section discussing brain research in the 1800's. The page has a small comic showing a person sitting in a chair with a surgeon on their left, holding a saw, and a person on the right holding clips connected to something electrical. The caption says "Gulp, not a good time to be a brain research volunteer.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 28/12/2025

#13 Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping

Steam capsule image for Duck Detective: the ghost of glamping. Says the game's name and shows the two main characters, Duke Detective and Freddy (the alligator), as well as 3 characters featured in its story: A white rabbit, a blue pigeon, and an orange goat.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 16/12/2025

I often have content ideas or snippets I want to post to my site that don't need a whole blog post. I came across a site with a "Notes" section, and decided to add something similar to my own site. For the 1st note, I added an SQL snippet to find the largest MySQL tables in a DB #SQL #DataAnalysis

Screenshot of new Notes section with subtitle that says "A place for code snippets, random thoughts, and other tiny posts.". Has an entry titled "Find largest tables in a MySQL database".

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 09/12/2025

One can always tell when I have an upcoming opening for new client work as that's the only time I log into LinkedIn 😅

LinkedIn post impression chart showing the last 90 days. For most of September and October, there were nearly zero impressions as no posts were made. Then, November and December show a large increase in impressions as I started posting again on LinkedIn.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 06/12/2025

#13 Pokémon Adventures Collector's Edition, Vol. 3

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 30/11/2025

A while ago, I built a tool that connects to business tools & sends me a daily email with the main metrics (screenshot uses random data). I recently added an in-depth weekly report. I'm thinking about turning it into a small SaaS. If this sounds useful to you, let me know. #BuildInPublic #Marketing

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 30/11/2025

#12 Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

Book cover for Sophie's World. Says "A novel about the history of philosophy". Author's name, Jostein Gaarder, is listed along with "Translated by Paulette Meller". Illustration shows a clock, a rabbit, a greek statue, some letters, and a lot of branches and vines.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 29/11/2025

#11 Pokémon Adventures Collector's Edition, Vol. 2.

Cover of Pokemon Adventures 2. Says Story by Hidenori Kusaka and Art by Mato. Shows one of the main characters, Blue, with several of his pokemon.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 28/11/2025

I mostly use PyCharm as my IDE, but I've heard a lot about Positron lately, so I thought I'd give it a try. I really like how integrated Streamlit and Quarto are. Being able to click the play button and automatically start the app and open the viewer is great.

Screenshot of Positron IDE. Has a Python file open on the left with some Streamlit code. Has a terminal open that is running the streamlit run command under the code file. Along the right is a browser view showing the dashboard.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 17/11/2025

I’ve been playing through New Super Lucky’s Tale on the Switch and I’m loving some of the completely random scenes and levels it has.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 14/11/2025

I was curious to know how many bills a U.S. Congress member introduces or co-sponsors. It turns out that most don't introduce new bills often. Many have only introduced a handful since the start of this term. #USPolitics #DataAnalysis

A scatterplot titled "119th Congress Bills Introduced Per Member" with subtitle of "A look at the number of bills sponsored (introduced) and cosponsored by members of the 119th Congress so far. The chart shows that most members have only sponsored a dozen or two bills this year but often cosponsor 100+. Though, there are many who have sponsored over 100 bills.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 20/10/2025

#9 The Restaurant of Lost Recipes

Book cover for The Restaurant of Lost Recipes by Hisashi Kashiwai. Says “Every meal is a mystery” and shows a cat with front paws on a table looking at some sushi.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 03/10/2025

This week in my organic chemistry class we were extracting caffeine from tea. After filtering and doing multiple rounds using a separatory funnel, I got to use this new device, the rotatory evaporator. I’m definitely enjoying these labs quite a bit. #STEM #Chemistry

A rotary evaporator device that boils away a liquid through pressure changes leaving the solute in the flask which is in the water.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 25/09/2025

This week in my Org Chem class, we are doing our first distillation lab. #Chemistry

Distillation system that has a flask of liquid on the right sitting in a heat element. The vapors from the boiling liquid move up through the tubing and down the water cooled condenser until it turns back into a liquid and drips out into the graduated cylinder on the left.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 02/09/2025

I earned my first Tableau certification this week! I've had several clients this year where I used Tableau, so I thought I'd go through their foundations certification to fill in some knowledge gaps. #DataAnalysis #Tableau

Certificate for "Salesforce Certified Tableau Desktop Foundations". Says "Presented to Frank Corso for successfully completing certification requirements". Issued September 01, 2025.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 31/08/2025

#8 Pokémon Adventures Collector's Edition, Vol. 1.

Book cover saying "Pokémon Adventures 01" with "Collector's Edition" at the top. Shows a young man wearing a red jacket and a hat with a Pikachu on his shoulder.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 24/08/2025

#9 Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. I had skipped this one on the GameCube when it first came out, so it was great that it came to Switch. #Nintendo

Ending scene of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. Several characters, including Mario, Peach, and Bowser, are on a stage that says "The End" with confetti everywhere.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 15/08/2025

In my next data story, I'm exploring how podcast episode duration differs across countries, categories, & other factors. An interesting trend is that episode length for top podcasts varies a lot across countries. A US podcast tends to be 50% longer than a Japanese podcast. #DataAnalysis #Podcast

Bar chart showing countries and median episode length in minutes for top podcasts in that country. United States and Canada have the longest at around 45 minutes for episodes with Japan having the shortest at around 30 minutes per episode.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 13/08/2025

Just discovered that Debian OS versions are all named after Toy Story characters (Debian 13 released a few days ago and is called Trixie). The Debian Project Leader was working at Pixar during the early versions. #Linux #OS #Debian

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 12/08/2025

My Python package, light-cache, passed 1,000 downloads! I know that's not much in the open-source world, but it's a fun milestone that some of my other packages haven't crossed.

Screenshot of the pepy tech page for the light-cache Python package that shows a tooltip saying "light-cache has been downloaded 1,044 times!". The page shows light-cache with a description of "A simple, lightweight caching library for disk-based or object-based caching".

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 11/08/2025

#8: Bastion. I started this game many years ago, but never finished it. When I picked up the Switch 2, I moved some indies that I never finished from my original Switch and am hoping to work through them.

Steam capsule art for Bastion. Says Bastion with a picture of the main character to the right.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 08/07/2025

I got the early prototypes built for the cargo UI, dialogs, and the main deposit area. It's still early, and I haven't done any of the real UI/design, so it looks rough, but it's starting to come together. #GameDev #BuildInPublic

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 07/07/2025

Chord diagrams are a fun way to visualize potential connections between different categorical values. I often use these during the early stages of analysis to identify interesting trends where two items have a lot more connections than others or ones that have many fewer connections.

Chord diagram of all the Pokémon types showing connections between types for Pokémon with two types. The connection that is most common is Normal-Flying, with some other notable ones being connections between bug and poison, between grass and poison, and between flying and bug.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 02/07/2025

#7: Once Upon A Jester. An amazing game. Highly recommend!

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 29/06/2025

#7 Art of Statistics by David Spiegelhalter. As someone working in data who is self-taught, I always pick up new concepts whenever I read a new statistics book, so I try to read through one now and then.

Book cover that says "The Art of Statistics: How to learn from data" on the front. Has a quote from Popular Science that says "This book should be required reading... A tour de force"

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 26/06/2025

Since the game I'm working on this time is a bit bigger than the tiny games I've done so far, I thought I'd explore how unit testing works in Godot. The GUT plugin made it super easy to get set up and running some initial tests. #GameDev #Godot

Godot Unit Testing (GUT) panel in the Godot UI. Displays a button to Run All with a status message stating "Everything passed!" On the right, it displays a run summary indicating that two test scripts were executed, which included six tests with a total of 32 assertions.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 10/06/2025

#6 Duck Detective: The Secret Salami. Out of the games I've played so far this year, this one is definitely one of my favorites.

Main image for the game. Says "Duck Detective the secret salami" near the bottom with a magnifying glass on top of the "D". Shows a Duck in a detective outfit with some characters in the background, including an alligator in business attire holding a coffee mug.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 07/06/2025

#6 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I didn't realize how long this book is. Definitely a good book, but it took a long while to get through it.

The book cover for The Count of Monte Cristo and has "Penguin Classics" and "Alexandre Dumas" on the cover. There is a picture of a few people outside of an old castle with some broken ships and a cloudy sky.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 30/05/2025

#5 Pilo and the Holobook. Interesting short game where you complete your holobook by scanning objects.

Main capsule art for the Pilo and the Holobook game showing a fox standing on its back feet with googles on its head and a large book on its back. The game title is shown to the right.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 27/05/2025

A tricky part of game development is that much of the initial work is on underlying systems & non-user-facing code. I've spent a lot of time on my game's unlocking/activating/deactivating upgrade system, but so far, I only have a button to show for it in my debug area. #GameDev #BuildInPublic

Screenshot of a debug area in my very early in development space game that shows a fuel remaining percentage, a button that says "Deactivate Speed Booster Upgrade", a blue ship, and 2 gold items. All have simplistic placeholder visuals.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 25/05/2025

I am working on a small podcast analysis project, and one of the things I am looking at is how long podcasts are in certain categories. I got a weird output for the Kids & Family Apple Charts & looked to see why. Turns out one of the top podcasts in the category is a 12-hour sound machine podcast 😅

Screenshot of part of Apple Podcasts charts for the Kids & Family category in the US. It shows 64th top podcast is a 12 hour sound machines for sleep podcast. Some others near it includes Evidence Based Birth, The Southern Tea, and Thomas & Friends Storytime.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 16/05/2025

With Looxi finished, the next game I want to create is a 2D space exploration game. Since the feel of the ship (e.g, acceleration, turning, slowing down, etc) is an important part of any space game, I thought I'd start setting up a simple test area for my ship to play around in. #GameDev

Game screen in Godot window showing a basic ship moving toward the right with a label saying "Fuel Remaining: 58%".

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 15/05/2025

#4 Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy. I’ve now played through all the trilogies and bundles in this series that’s on the Switch! #Nintendo

Screenshot of end screen in Spirit of Justice that shows some of the characters and the word “End”.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 18/04/2025

Getting the UX right for the survey participant in EasyDecide has been tricky, as there is a 2-step process for choosing the answers and then ordering them. I created a new drag-and-drop UI today for sorting them in the 2nd step, which I think sort of works. #BuildInPublic

Screenshot of the current UI in EasyDecide for ranking the selected preferences. Has a header of "Now, let's put them in order!" which a description of "Drag your favorites into position — #1 is your top choice!". Then, each of the selected options are listed and can be re-ordered as needed.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 12/04/2025

#5 Escaping Gravity by Lori Garver #BookSky

Book cover for Escaping Gravity by Lori Garver which includes tagline of “My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age”. Also says “Foreword by Walter Isaacson”. Shows a picture of the Earth along the bottom with the top half showing the stars.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 05/04/2025

I'm still trying to figure out what I want to include in the game summary screen shown when a player finishes a stage in Looxi. I show the final score, the longest word found, and the best word in terms of score but it still feels a bit empty. #GameDev #BuildInPublic

Screenshot of current game summary screen, which shows a final score of 269, the longest word found being "tosser", and the best word found being "zoos". It has a button to return to the title screen.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 21/03/2025

#3 FUR Squadron. This is a fun Star Fox inspired short game. #NintendoSwitch

Fur Squadron ending screen. Computer simulated landscape with a sun setting behind some hills and says “The End”.

Screenshot of Fur Squadron gameplay showing an axolotl character saying “That will teach you to not touch my stuff” with some emojis. The player’s spaceship is shown with a health bar along the top.

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Frank Corso @frankcorso.me · 16/03/2025

#4 Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin. Continuing reading through this author's Hainish Cycle series.

Original book cover for Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin that has a quote from New Worlds that says "LeGuin's creations rank with the best".

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