Hey there! My name is John Camardo, and I am a nerd. I love jigsaw puzzles, Scrabble, Star Wars, and math. I’m also an avid sports fan, though I haven’t played much myself (I’m a nerd, remember?). I drink a lot of Kentucky bourbon and eat a lot of pizza. My girlfriend Emilia is pretty high on my list of favorite things, too. My biggest love of all, though, is data.
While working my day job at a large commercial bank, I came across static site generation. I was looking for more creative ways to tell stories with data. Before I discovered static site generation, I was using Excel, PowerPoint, Python and occasionally Tableau to try and tell my stories. No matter how hard I tried or how creative I got, no combination of these programs allowed me to do what I wanted, which is to tell awesome, interactive stories with data.
Eventually I came across Gatsby, which got me interested in learning Javascript and React. My vision for this site is to put all of these elements together, a place where sports, data, and coding collide.
Originally, I just wanted to showcase my horse racing analysis. Horse racing is my favorite sport (that’s where my taste for Kentucky bourbon comes from), and it’s where I started to play around with putting all my different interests together. After spending a lot of my time in that arena, however, I found football data. I thought it could be fun to create models that would produce optimal daily fantasy lineups.
And thus, this website was born.
The sports that I currently cover are:
In the future I also plan to add coverage for:
Right now, the blog section is serving as a place for me to log the work that has gone into the development of the site. I hope to evolve the blog into a place for some of the analysis on horse racing and a log for other work that I do.
The card section of the site is currently the home to the analysis that I would typically output to Google Sheets. Instead of formatting data that I paste into Google Sheets for betting on horse racing that I do, I thought that a special section of the site might serve as a good way to experiment with React and Gatsby, and present the data analysis that I perform in a better way.