Hi, I am Will

Will Bonnell

Fullstack Developer at Oliver Wyman Actuarial

I am a developer with four years of working experience building data visualizations, developer and business intelligence tools, and doing data science. I primarily work in R and Rshiny, D3 and Svelte, and vanilla JS/CSS. On the side, I build freelance sites and visualizations. My most recent gig is helping to build out a visualization library for Microsoft Research called Datamations. In my free time, I like to cook, bake, and brew beer!

Skills

R
R

I have over three years of experience using R for data cleaning, analysis of survey data, machine learning, and data visualisation. I have experience with functional programming in R and building R packages.

R Shiny
R Shiny

I’ve used R Shiny for about three years to build an array of applications and dashboards for professional clients. I have experience working with Shiny modules and {golem}, building packages to custom bind Shiny inputs, and writing JS for Shiny.

D3.js
D3.js

I have about two years of experience using D3.js to create interactive data visualisations. I’ve worked with D3, R2D3 in R Shiny, and have used vanilla JS and JQuery for manipulation of features in D3 visualisations.

Frontend development
Frontend development

I’m a skilled CSS developer and have written production CSS for various dashboards and webpages. I’m also experienced with various JavaScript frameworks. I have experience developing components in React.js, using D3 in React, and have toyed with other frameworks like Svelte.

Git
Git

Day to day, I collaborate on projects with others in Github and have experience using internal tools like bitbucket for collaborative programming.

GSAP ScrollTrigger
GSAP ScrollTrigger

At NORC I have led an initiative to create scrollytelling products for the organization. I’m proficient in utilizing Greensock animations, D3 animations, and utilizing the ScrollTrigger.js library to create scrollytelling articles.

Workflow, CI, and Cloud
Workflow, CI, and Cloud

I’ve worked with many tools for automation and continuous integration, including AWS S3 for data management and client delivery, Adobe Spark for data parallelism, and tools like Travis-CI and Github Actions for automation. I’ve also toyed with tools like Continuous Machine Learning.

Experiences

1
Consultant, fullstack development
Oliver Wyman Actuarial Consulting

September 2021 - Present, Chicago, IL

Oliver Wyman Actuarial is a managerial consulting firm. At the company I work on a small team of developers who build and support applications for actuaries, stakeholders, and dozens of clients

Responsibilities:
  • Led the development of nearly a dozen client dashboards
  • Developed rich features like CRUD tables to interact with databases, novel data visualizations, and new components
  • Led an innovation project to create a library of Svelte components for use in serverless sites
  • Worked on a team to build new infrastructure for application deployments with cloud-computing services and containerization
NORC at the University of Chicago

July 2018 - September 2021, Chicago, IL

NORC at the University of Chicago is a non-partisan research institution that delivers reliable data and rigorous analysis to guide critical programmatic, business, and policy decisions.

Data Analyst

December 2020 - September 2021

  • Helped lead an initiative to develop a D3 components library
  • Led initiative to create scrollytelling products with GSAP and ScrollTrigger.js
  • Managed data cleaning procedures on ‘big data’ source for a large enterprise project
  • Led the development of several client-delivered R Shiny application and the development of interactive visualisations in SVG/vanilla JS and D3.js
  • Managed client data deliveries for large enterprise project with AWS S3
Research Assistant

July 2018 - Nov 2020

  • Cleaned and analyzed survey data and wrote reports on the analysis for publication
  • Aided in the development of methodological approaches with statistical and machine learning techniques
  • Created, tested, and deployed in production natural language models to classify open ended survey text responses
  • Developed and maintained R shiny applications to output client deliverables, streamline workflows, and visualize data
  • Built R packages to query data from client APIs and improve reporting methods
  • Created static and interactive data visualizations including infographics, choropleth and cartogram maps, and charts and graphs for inclusion in NORC publications
2
3
Field Organizer
NextGen America

May 2018 - June 2018, Blacksburg, VA

NextGen America (formerly NextGen Climate) was founded by Tom Steyer in 2013 with the mission of encouraging young Americans to register to vote.

Responsibilities:
  • Managed full-time staffed campaign fellows and volunteers
  • Orchestrated college voter registration efforts
  • Developed data-driven call and contact lists for campaign efforts
  • Managed and QC’d NGP VAN data for the area
Exchange Student
University of Amsterdam

August 2016 - January 2017, Amsterdam, NL

A modern institution with a long and rich history, the UvA is one of Europe’s most prominent research-led universities.

Responsibilities:
  • Participated in an exchange program, studying history and politics
4
5
Student and Research Assistant
University of Virginia

August 2014 - May 2018, Charlottesville, VA

The University is an iconic public institution of higher education, boasting nationally ranked schools and programs, diverse and distinguished faculty, a major academic medical center and proud history as a renowned research university.

Responsibilities:
  • Studied in the department of politics, achieving a B.A. in International Relations
  • Served as a research assistant for Daniel Gingerich, aiding in the parsing of Brazilian Census data to prepare for analysis at the QuantCollab at UVA.

Projects

shinykeyboard
Author, Contributor July 2020 - Present

An R package to include a click-able on-screen keyboard in a Shiny application.

Star
ctar
Author, Contributor September 2019 - present

An R package to interact with the Chicago Transit Authority API to query live Chicago bus and train data and get shapefiles for transit routes.

Star
Components library
Author, Contributor March 2021 - present

My personal components library built in React.js, deployed on Storybook. This library includes components I built in Josh Comeau’s CSS for JavaScript Developers course, the Fullstack D3 course, and some I built just for fun!

Star
How the press and public can find common purpose
Contributor December 2019

A white paper with the American Press Institute that assesses Americans' views on the press' role and efficacy in overseeing and providing a check on authority.

Details
Daily Fantasy Sports Optimizer
Developer November 2020

A web application created with Tomas Okal to generate tailored daily fantasy football lineups using linear optimization.

Details
Recent Migration Patterns in the U.S.
Author, Developer May 2020

A piece of scrolly-telling data journalism to show trends in U.S. migration across states. This project was developed as a proof of concept for scrolly-telling in R Shiny.

Details
Chicago Vision Zero Dashboard
Contributor October 2019

A dashboard developed at a hackathon for the city of Chicago to display traffic fatalities data.

Star
What's My Social Media Age?
Contributor February 2019

An NORC-built web application that predicts a user’s age based on their social media use, as compared to that of probability-sampled survey data.

Details

Recent Posts

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Automated Advent of Code repo badges

Advent of Code The Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of short language-agnostic programming puzzles. This year I have been using the Advent of Code to test my knowledge of programming principles, work on algorithmic efficiency, and practice working in new (to me) languages like Julia. Since I am including my work publicly on github, I also thought it would be interesting to try to create an automated repo badge to show off how many stars I have accumulated.

December 10, 2020 Read
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Custom datatable Tooltips in Shiny

Tooltips If you’ve used a web browser or a programming IDE, you’ve almost certainly come across a tooltip. While tooltips can serve to clarify information in a webpage, natively they also obscure it. These bubbles of information require a user to hover over an element to see the tooltip and get the information. A user might not be aware that this information exists or users using screen-readers might never come across this tooltip.

December 1, 2020 Read
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Hypothetical Outcome Plots

The Uncertainty of Uncertainty Conveying uncertainty in data visualisations has become a growing topic in data visualisation circles in the past few years. When considering how to visualise data, one must consider who their audience is and how that audience might interpret a visualisation. In the same way writers adopt different styles of writing to convey information to different audiences, dataviz practitioners might choose color, layout, or typography to suit different audiences (e.

February 5, 2020 Read

Contact


I'm available for consultations and contracted work for data visualisation, survey development and analysis, and the development of R Shiny applications and webpages. I enjoy collaborating with new people. For information on commission and consulting rates, potential collaborations and 'for fun' work, or to just say hi, contact me in the following ways: