Who Wrote This?
I'm Carlos, a Development Economist from Nicaragua. I have a B.Sc. in Applied Economics and an M.Sc. in Development Economics, but honestly, most of what's in this guide I learned by doing, breaking things, and starting over.
I've spent the last decade working with data across research institutions and international organizations, mostly on topics related to rule of law, democracy, governance, and socioeconomic development. These days I work in building data pipelines, developing AI-assisted tools, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make analytical work more reproducible and transparent across different settings.
My day-to-day is mostly R and Python. I also have opinions about project structure, naming conventions, and why you should version control your code and data, which is probably why this guide exists.
I started putting these ideas together back in 2023 with a former colleague (Santiago Pardo), and what began as a few blog posts turned into something more ambitious. This is that something.
You can find me at:
