Hello, world
Welcome to my personal website. I’m Aaron Cochran, the Research Systems Specialist for Oregon Enterprise Data Analytics (OEDA). OEDA is a shared-services research team within the Office of Performance, Policy and Research (OPPR) at the Oregon Department of Human Services, co-funded by the Oregon Health Authority, so our work serves both agencies.
From analyst to systems builder
I’ve spent more than ten years with the Oregon Department of Human Services, and my role has changed a lot in that time. I started as a Research Analyst 4, leading interagency research projects with partners from the Oregon Health Authority, the Oregon Employment Department, the Oregon Department of Education and Oregon Housing and Community Services.
Along the way, I fell in love with the technical side of the job and started spending my spare time at work building durable systems and workflows for my teammates. I brought GitHub into our process to make our research more reproducible and transparent. In 2017 I led the procurement of our first machine learning server, Microsoft Machine Learning Server, which ran Microsoft’s own distribution of R. That server became the backbone for the predictive models my team built for agency programs. Microsoft retired the product in 2022, and in 2023 I migrated our remaining production model to open-source R so it could keep running.
What I work on now
Today I lead our team’s research infrastructure. I led the procurement of our Posit Team environment, which runs in Snowpark Container Services as a Snowflake Native App, and I’m its administrator. That modern, scalable platform now hosts the production models and APIs our team builds, including some of the work I’m proudest of. I hope to write about it here in more detail.
Off the clock
Outside of work, I’m the lucky father of two young kids. When they aren’t keeping me busy with art projects, outdoor play, Fortnite matches and Minecraft builds, I love reading, creative writing and running tabletop RPGs. For more than a decade, I’ve had the good fortune of leading the same core group of friends through weekly adventures.
What you’ll find here
- Technical: the platforms, pipelines and tools behind our work.
- Gov data: what doing data work inside state government is really like.
- Off the clock: game sessions, worldbuilding and the technical tinkering I do in Foundry Virtual Tabletop (Foundry VTT).
- Neurodivergence: what I’ve learned about working as a neurodivergent adult, and the strategies that help me thrive.
I’ll do my best to keep posts short, interesting and relevant. I’m glad you’re here, and I hope you find something worthwhile.