👨‍💻 Data Science Transition Week 4

Last updated Jun 26, 2022 Edit Source

• Data science
• Career

I’m changing the theme of this newsletter to be about mastery.

I started this blog to learn how to write more clearly and to share my progress with others to:

1. Hold myself accountable, and
2. Help others in my position in the future.

My writing is not just about data science. I’m sharing my journey in pursuit of mastery in my craft. Perhaps this blog will morph into something else in the future, but for now, that is its purpose.

First, I’ll share my overall learnings about my career and my strategy, and then I’ll share some updates on my side project.

I learned some powerful ideas this week that I’m excited to apply to my career. They primarily have to do with career progression for a software developer.

• I discovered Patrick McKenzie, also known as @Patio11. His writing on career progression as a software developer and negotiating salaries is a must-read for anybody in tech.
• I’m implementing Cal Newport’s The Time Block Planner method to be more productive and increase my focus time. I’ll report back with the results after I have more data.
• I listened to the 80,000 Hours podcast this week with Nova DasSarma, which I also recommend for developers. She is young and has had a remarkable career by having a growth mindset, constantly improving her skill-set, and saying yes to opportunities. It helped solidify my strategy of thinking of your career with a mastery mindset and making choices that afford you the highest optionality.

All of these combined make me feel better about my decision to spend more time on side-projects and improve my skills in software development. I think machine learning will be just one tool in my toolbox, and I’m very excited to see where this takes me. Furthermore, I’m excited to look at a problem and feel confident I can solve it.

Anybody who has taken a similar path has a closet full of failed projects, many of which died from just not being skilled enough to complete them in a reasonable amount of time. I’m sure that just continuing to chip away at new projects will allow me to express my creativity while expanding my capability.

This week I finally downloaded all of the available tweets for my friend @PIaceboAddict, coming to about 820 in total.

I also made some higher-level changes to the project.

• I renamed the project Mockingjay.
• I consulted with a friend about using serverless architecture for the project and will build using it after I have my MVP. Building serverless will help me keep costs down and explore a valuable skill-set.
• I plan to post the project to Rapid API so I can share it with others.

I'm a freelance software developer located in Denver, Colorado. If you're interested in working together or would just like to say hi you can reach me at me@ this domain.