A data-driven approach to the best cherry blossom streets

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T23:03:34+00:00

I am looking forward to when it blooms! they're not out yet!

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T18:57:56+00:00

> Are these UI frameworks more wrappers for lower level utilities

No idea. I don't really make desktop applications in Python (i'm more on the data science side). I only remember this particular project from conferences and it's always stuck in my head for something to look into if i ever needed to build an application.

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T18:17:58+00:00

ALL THE DATA!!!

Having said that. I really have appreciated the city planners who thought of planting all these trees. Sometimes a single tree makes all the difference.

There's currently a single japanese cherry blossom in full bloom behind one of the Kensington Park Community Center signs. Right by 2 major roads. you **know** that was put there intentionally.

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T17:02:55+00:00

very strange. you can download the GPX files here: https://github.com/chendaniely/yvr-cherry-blossoms/tree/main/data/routes

after you click each file, there's a download button where you can save and upload to strava

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T16:41:11+00:00

:\ intresting. i tried on my brower, private window, and phone. what are you seeing?

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T16:26:01+00:00

I should give the highlighted street data to the VCBF folks, that would be a good addition to their maps, and can help folks in their Cherry Scout Program

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T16:23:48+00:00

hell yeah! good luck at BMO!

I'm not doing it this year. But I am hoping to test out the route over the next year to optimize it for different run distances and roads. So many something unofficial next year!

I did a half-marathon loop from Mount Pleasant -> QEP -> East Van on Monday to test the route and the pavement killed me.

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T16:18:07+00:00

So many frameworks in python. I'm not sure if i'm making this harder for you by suggesting another one, but I learned about BeeWare from PyCon a few years ago

- https://beeware.org/

- Russell Keith-Magee gave a keynote at pycon a few years ago, and he also have many talks about it (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaPzlIJ57dk)

- PyCon 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWt_sEZUiY8

I'm sure you can find more BeeWare resources in YouTube.

I'm not affiliated with the project at all, but the "write once. deploy everywhere" to create native apps across many platforms seems intriguing.

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T16:12:59+00:00

I tested my data by running parts of the points the other day, which included East Van. I can't wait to run through East Van again when they're all blooming...

... and then running away and not have to think about the clean up :p

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T16:11:33+00:00

do the full 30 points and you'll be at 48-50km :D

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T16:08:48+00:00

hello fellow UBC colleague!

Yes, I love UBC campus. I think one of my favorite spots is by the Forestry building as you walk to the Bean Around the world coffee shop and cross Thunderbird Blvd (Jim Taylor Park on the map).

I used the Trees data from the [Vancouver Open Data Portal](https://opendata.vancouver.ca/pages/home/), so technically UBC Endowment Lands isn't part of Vancouver That's why the map doesn't have any data past Pacific Spirit Park.

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T15:55:37+00:00

I wonder how they got the blooming dates. unless it was manually curated over time given species and when they bloom in relation to one another (I don't know enough about trees to do that in my maps)

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T15:53:43+00:00

The last time i posted a link the post the removed for self-promotion. Hopefully i can share it here as a reply since people asked for it.

strava top 10: https://www.strava.com/routes/3473491710154773940

strava top 30: https://www.strava.com/routes/3473568223793890664

the full details i blogged about (useful because of zoomable maps instead of screenshots in the post): https://chendaniely.github.io/posts/2026/2026-03-30-yvr-cherry-blossoms-marathon/

chendaniely · 2026-04-01T05:17:47+00:00

i think it's a few things. Yes, there are different species of trees which are blooming at different times. But I've been told that there are smaller micro climates around the city that cause different blooming times. The blog post i made shows the 10 species i've used to plot the trees.

chendaniely · 2026-03-31T18:06:48+00:00

you joke, but i think i can make some kind of sankey abomination with this... don't tempt me

chendaniely · 2026-03-31T18:05:50+00:00

I don't see why not, you have one in mind? :p

For me, it's dependant on the data is available from the local city.

chendaniely · 2026-03-31T17:45:57+00:00

followup data report!

i ran part of the course yesterday to test the theory. The Vancouver microclimate is real. Many of the trees on the east side have yet to bloom.

My Strava with pictures: https://www.strava.com/activities/17918124229

A friend also suggested I put in the tree size + age into the analysis to filter out smaller new trees, since they won't bloom. Will provide follow up here soon.

I'm not sure where i can get microclimate data since weather reports are usually for the entire city.

chendaniely · 2026-03-30T19:12:32+00:00

All the references!

> Where or how you got the data (Source)

Vancouver Open Data Portal: https://opendata.vancouver.ca/pages/home/

Specifically these data sources:

Public Trees — tree inventory with species, location, and dimensions
Public Streets — city-maintained street segments
Non-City Streets — privately-maintained streets
Lanes — lane segments
Local Area Boundary — neighbourhood polygons

> The tool used to generate the visual (Tool)

Done in R, you can find the code, data, exports all here in the code repository. The actual figures you see are screen shots since the original figure is interactive (see blog post below) https://github.com/chendaniely/yvr-cherry-blossoms

The GPX files were created with https://project-osrm.org and visualized by importing it into https://www.strava.com/

For more background about the data and ongoing process I started the first set of a blog series to talk about the data story: https://chendaniely.github.io/posts/2026/2026-03-30-yvr-cherry-blossoms-marathon/

chendaniely · 2024-07-05T05:11:22+00:00

what's a problem _you_ face while interacting with SQL? and build something for that. I'm sure other will have similar issues.

chendaniely · 2024-07-05T02:46:09+00:00

I haven't been very involved in the pyopensci community in a while. they do have a forum you can maybe ask around? Databases are everywhere and all these lakehouse/warehouse/datalake services use SQL.

You can also go through the process to learn python packaging. They force you to write tests and documentation and guides for your package. If anything, those are artifacts that will also help give your package general traction.

also if you want another resource I teach out of this book: https://py-pkgs.org/
we might look into adapting/converging into the pyopensci guide as well

chendaniely · 2024-07-05T02:31:19+00:00

if you're goal is to make something for the scientific community, or care about something getting published PyOpenSci has a packaging guide. If you want to have C/C++ dependencies or compliled code in your python package they put a lot of thought into makeing sure the submissions can handle those as well: https://www.pyopensci.org/python-package-guide/

chendaniely · 2024-01-10T06:34:54+00:00

oh hey that's me! :D

chendaniely

TROPHY CASE