Ken Johnson

Data Engineer at Travelers Insurance, MS Analytics at Georgia Tech

I build governance pipelines and cloud automations that keep shared Databricks and AWS infrastructure cost-efficient, compliant, and secure for hundreds of analytics users at Travelers.

Outside of work, I like building side projects that scratch my own curiosity, from interactive maps and transit tools to machine learning experiments. The projects below are things I've built in my free time to learn new tools, explore data I find interesting, and ship something people can actually use.

Photo of Ken Johnson

Projects

Gopher X Metro

One live map of every U of M campus bus alongside Metro Transit buses and light rail, rebuilt to run free with no API keys. I built it in 2024 with a team from Social Coding at UMN and revived it in 2026 after the original hosting lapsed.

Delay Forecast: Will My Bus Be Late?

Pick a route, stop and time to see how often each departure runs late or early, plus the chance it is 5+ minutes late. LightGBM models retrained daily on live-feed history and weather run right in the browser.

Will my bus be late? Route 2 toward Central / U of M from Franklin Ave and Hennepin, listing each upcoming departure with its usual delay and chance of running 5+ minutes late

Twin Cities Living Quality Map

Scores every Minneapolis and St. Paul district from 0 to 100 on safety, opportunity, amenities, transportation and economic profile, using public data refreshed automatically. Search any address to see its breakdown and multi-year trends.

Minneapolis Home Assessment Check

Type a Minneapolis address to compare its assessed value with time-adjusted prices of similar nearby sales, plus an independent estimate of this month's sale price. The price model is more accurate than the city's (9.4% vs 12.0% error) and never sees the city's values.

Minneapolis Home Assessment Check for 2959 Lincoln St NE: the city value next to what similar homes sold for and the model estimate with a range, and a stamped verdict comparing the two

Will My Flight Be Delayed?

Enter a US flight number and date to get the chance it arrives 15+ minutes late, with a route map and live weather. A LightGBM model trained on 7M flights picks out delayed flights 73% of the time, versus 62% from a flight's past on-time record alone.

Will My Flight Be Delayed? for AA 2919 from DFW to CVG: airport codes on split-flap tiles, the route map and weather, and a 39% chance of arriving 15+ minutes late

Movie Recommender

Rate a few movies and get a ranked list of what to watch next. The model behind it won my benchmark of eight recommenders on 33.8M ratings, ranking relevant movies about 7x better than a standard baseline.

Movie Recommender after rating six movies: a ranked grid of recommended films, each explained by the movies it is similar to, with genre and year filters

My Social Media, as Data 2026

Fourteen years of my own Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and other exports, published only as aggregates. It shows how recommendation algorithms took over my feeds, with my top 10 accounts going from most of my likes to under 10%.

My Social Media, as Data: Fourteen years of being fed, with headline stats like 43x more Instagram likes at the peak and 94% of likes being Reels, and eleven chapters to explore

Games

Creekside

A couch co-op pixel puzzle-platformer for two players, where an otter and a red panda work through ten chapters of teamwork puzzles. Built from scratch for the browser on the Emerald WebGL engine, with procedural pixel art and synthesized chiptune audio.

Source Code