You have to have some sympathy for companies trying to feel their way through the new business realities we see post-covid. Few companies really spent time thinking about what a future might look like after the pandemic, busy trying to stay afloat or dealing with the increase in business from lockdown. And if anything has changed emerging from covid, it’s workers’ expectations of employment.
Command-line interface (CLI) tools have gone through rapid innovation in the last couple years. Ancient stalwarts have been challenged with better newcomers that make life easier, quicker, and better. I feel this Cambrian explosion of new tools may be because of better CLI creation libraries, but think a certain nod has to go to systems programming languages like Go and Rust becoming more popular.
In the vein of my 2021 Software Tools list , and the CLI LIfe Starter post, I’ve run across a whack of great CLI tools in the last couple months which I incorporated into my workflows, and a notable fistful of five. All are available on both OSX (via homebrew) and Linux.
Part II in a series of posts on getting started on financial independence and resiliency. The initial impetus for this came from COVID Career Advice . The first post in the series focusing on making yourself resilient is Getting Started on Financial Independence: Financial Resiliency .
This post focuses on getting started growing your assets and investing once you’ve sorted your basic financial hygiene out . Please read that and go through the 80/20 exercise and assessment if you are not in a position of setting aside 10-20% of your take home for financial growth every month.
I experimented with Improv last quarter to get me out of my comfort zone and a potential gateway drug to standup (and frankly, better communication). I’ve become a big fan of the form, had a blast, and surprised at how it’s spilled over usefully into business and real life.
What the hell is Improv, anyway?
Usually the first question I get from people when I tell them I’m doing improv is some variation on this. Most people have heard the name, associate it with Saturday Night Live, Second City, Whose Line Is It Anyway? or some form of comedy but actually don’t know what it actually is.
Coming back to using Python and Pandas from GoLang has made me aware of the quirks of using dataframes in the place of typed data structures.
While pandas has great convenience features for basic data manipulations on tables, munging get trickier in places you’d want to use a map or hash in other languages. Actually common, and while pandas has a MultiIndex feature, it is a mistake to try to use these with the common Python iterator pattern for star in stars: syntax. Doing this in pandas on cmplex, large datasets can be inefficient and slow. Functions are the faster, more efficient way to do this.
My COVID Career Advice post had a key section on making yourself financially independent. It was more popular than I would have guessed and spawned backchannel chats with people on how best to get started on financially resiliency. This post is a round up of the advice I’ve given people who asked. YMMV. Nothing in here is rocket science, though it requires a commitment, some setup, and some habits (or discipline) around taking your financial health seriously. Behaviour change is key.
I experimented a lot with process during pandemic lockdown and with the shift to WFH. Successful experiments had tooling implications. While I do feel tools are less important than your actual process — process trumps all — some tools do make some things you want to emphasize or change easier (or conversely, your existing tools might make it harder).
The big changes in my flow came about from trying to come up with a more web-based, easier sharing and collaborative process than emacs org-mode allowed. I wanted a nicer, more modern writing experience, and abstractions to keep me better organized than a flat file or folder hierarchy. Additionally, I wanted to experiment with implementing a Zettelkasten after reading How to Take Smart Notes which a note-taking-as-thinking organizational system purporting to be conducive to learning, creativity, and content creation, particularly in the academic arena. So, I needed effortless bi-directional linking of concepts, a beautiful writing environment that organized itself but could be modified, and robust task management.
Interestingly, this post came about from me reflecting on how my tooling had changed in 2020 during the pandemic (blog post pending). Ultimately though, what it’s led me to believe is that while tooling is helpful (and incremental), process and systems trump all. No magic tool will save you if you have broken process (and good processes can be executed with simple tools.). So, choose what you optimize for. Certain tools will help you focus on certain things, but process improvements are what ultimately pay large dividends. I made a number of core refinements in 2020 during some semi-sabbatical time which needed a post to share and what worked (and is working) for me.
Hiring is hard. Hiring data scientists (and MLEs) is harder. This has been my experience building major data teams on a couple of continents and what I advise you actually look for in Individual Contributors and Managers from a vetting perspective.
Why is it so hard to hire for data scientists? There’re a few reasons.
On the bad old days of everyone trying to do “big data” you’d often see desperate CIOs or similar in large companies, basically hire a bunch of PhDs and throw them in a corner with some vague direction to “do data science.”
I managed to get through 35 books in 2020. These are the ones you want to read and why. Also, a Do Not Read list to save yourself valuable reading time by not wasting it.
2020 started off really strong, though textbooks sucked up a large amount of reading time this year (and my will to recreationally read as often). Plus, my read-at-lunch-at-work habit crumbled with lockdown and not having to go into the office. So, not a stellar number of books, but respectable. Some interesting pondered and digested.