Harry Ganz

25 July 2024

Living in the Northeast U.S. and looking at houses on Zillow is painful. Everything is unaffordable, but it could be worse. I could be looking for homes in Teton County, Wyoming. In this post, I have collected county level home value data to find out where the most and least expensive places to buy a home in the U.S. are.

14 March 2024

Doing a proof-of-concept (P.O.C.) before building something complex or uncertain is an immensely useful tool when developing software; however, I learned that it is pretty easy to mess up a P.O.C. and turn it from something useful into a total waste of time. If a P.O.C. is done right it can help identify tricky parts of an approach and nail down feasibility. If a P.O.C. is done wrong, it could fail to actually assess how feasible an approach is and lead to poor estimates, missed deadlines, and possibly even an unusable mess of software.

27 February 2024

Every time I compulsively check house prices near me I feel like I am picking at a scab. Everything just seems so crazy expensive it is hard to believe that things have ever been so bad. But is that actually true? It is easy to see that house prices are higher now, even adjusted for inflation, than they have ever been, and interest rates are still quite high (in early 2024) relative to the past 30 years or so. However, I can’t quite shake the feeling that perhaps what we are really seeing is a return to how housing was earlier in the century. How can we know? I have looked through historic data on house prices, wages, interest rates, and house features to get to the bottom of this question. Are houses really more expensive than they have ever been or were the last couple decades an anomaly of especially low housing prices?