A few weeks ago, British Columbia announced that they were implementing a vaccine passport system. It started being enforced this week and to prepare for that they have a system to download the “cards” from the government’s Health Gateway website. Turns out, the card is a QR code that you can download to your phone and present to businesses. They’ve released a companion app that businesses can use to scan the QR codes and verify they are valid proofs of vaccine. I was curious how the system works, so I did some reading and wrote some code to see what I could learn.

In 2018, I quietly set myself a challenge - to spend the whole year only reading books by women. I didn’t tell anyone else I was doing it until January 2019 (much to the chagrin of my wife). In that year, I read 17 books, all by women authors.

It’s now been over two years since I did this and I was curious to see if my reading habits have changed. Fortunately, I’ve been logging every book I read in GoodReads since 2014, so the data to answer this question exists. This isn’t a post to talk about the technical details of how I analysed the data, so let’s get to a graph.

About a year ago, in September 2019, a new director was hired to lead the organization I’m part of at work. Normally, this wouldn’t be a particularly noteworthy event, but her arrival ultimately had a profound impact on the work I’m doing today. First, let’s provide some context.