I’m shutting down the blog. Well, I won’t be publishing new posts, anyway; the archived material will remain online, in case anyone finds it useful.

I started Dart-Throwing Chimp in the spring of 2011, not long after I made the jump to freelancing, with a few goals in mind. I wanted to make myself more visible and appealing to potential clients. I wanted to practice and improve as a writer, a researcher, and a coder. And I wanted to participate in interesting conversations with colleagues and the wider world.

The blog succeeded on all of those counts. In so doing, though, it also became a larger and larger job of its own. Some of the more involved posts, like my annual coup forecasts, required several days of work. Even the shorter ones often take hours to write, and there were stretches when I was writing three or four of those each week.

I don’t get paid for any of that time. For a while, that strategy made sense to me. It doesn’t any more. The personal and professional opportunity costs have come to outweigh the benefits.

I’m shuttering the blog, but I continue to look for new work as a writer and a data scientist, for lack of a better term. If you think I might be useful to you or your organization—as a freelancer, or maybe as something else—please let me know (ulfelder at gmail dot com; CV here).

Meanwhile, thanks for reading, and I hope I’ll see you around.