First of all, thank you for signing up at peterfabor.com and being one of the early subscribers 🙏

This is the first newsletter I'm sending out.


My plans for this year were a bit different, yours probably too.

Some of the most impacted industries because of Covid-19 are travel and events. I've spent the last couple of years building Surf Office, a business that combines them both 😬 

As a company, we reacted very quickly to the upcoming threat of coronavirus as we knew that there is a high chance that our business will go down literally to zero from one month to another. And that was exactly what happened. I'll probably share more about it in one of the next newsletters.

Less business combined with quarantine resulted that I had more time and decided to dive into a few side-projects. One of them is this newsletter.

Another was a geospatial analysis. It doesn't sound very sexy, right?
 

A large part of our business at Surf Office is partnering with hotels and other types of hospitality providers. As we have very specific criteria for these partners, we spend a lot of time researching them.

We started to look at the ways to automate this process last year. First scraping the data from Booking, then adding them on maps and doing some additional analysis. I knew more-less the theory but the challenge was the technical part of it.

So I hired an experienced freelancer on Upwork and besides performing the job, Zahid's task was to make a screencast video teaching me how to replicate the analysis by myself.
 

These were quite simple projects but I saw how huge potential geospatial analysis has. After corona cleaned a bit my calendar, I jumped on Coursera to do this course by Penn State University. 
 

This course was a total game-changer for me. I learned the theory, possible use cases, and started to play with different tools like Carto and ArcGIS.


I was hooked 🎣 I started working on a few ideas and publishing them on my blog: analyzing "touristy-ness" and popularity of Lisbon's neighborhoods. 
 

The topic is quite exciting and I started to dig more: combining the results of this survey with some other hard data (e.g. real estate prices) inspired me to work on a "formula" that can automatically identify underpriced properties on the market. But that's for another story.

How do you like this newsletter? Did you enjoy it? 

Let me know by replying to this email ↩️

Cheers,
Peter ✌️