The Weekly Wrap: 1
What I've been reading and thinking about this week
A chronological timeline of my shenanigans:
As my journey continues of becoming the sexiest analyst turned engineer, I’ve begun to read documentation like books. And yes, I read it all. I think making this a part of my daily routine is making me into a juicy hunk. By reading documentation like my wife reads murder-romance books, I am able to point out many things to my coworkers on how to improve out current methodologies. Of course they don’t usually listen, but that’s a different topic.
I haven’t dove deep into this yet, but I’m sure it will blossom into something that makes me seem like a profound prophet. I bring this up because I’ve never heard of anyone talk about how Wisdom is personified as a woman. And let me just stop you before you ask, no, I’m not saying that women aren’t wise and Wisdom should be personified as a man. What I am asking is what are the implications of Wisdom being a woman? Some googling will show us that men die before women and I’ve heard that it’s because men tend to do some stupid things… A tangible example? Insurance costs more for men - try and prove me wrong.
As a young lad starting to save for a house, I’ve done quite a bit of research on mobile homes. Overall, their standards are the same, if not higher, than traditional homes. I’ve also come to challenge the idea of depreciating mobile homes. I think there may be some confusion over correlation and causation. I think the stereotypical owner of a mobile home does not take care of their home, which of course causes it to depreciate. But what if you had someone who took care of their mobile home and bought land in an up-and-coming area? I’d be willing to bet that thing will appreciate.
Feast your eyes on some of these mobile homes: https://www.mycandghomes.com/
However, one major concern I have is that I plan to move to Florida and Florida has those hurricane things. While mobile homes can, and have gotten much better at, withstanding hurricanes, I think it’s a hard sell that it’s better than cinder block houses.
As an analyst, I feel as though our work is more ambiguous than that of an engineer. Also, I’m the only analyst that I know that actively commits everything from ad-hoc queries to python analyses into GitHub. The combination of those two things makes it easy to question if an analyst is doing a good job. I honestly hate this. If I work my butt off, I expect to be rewarded, and analysts don’t get that as often.
In attempt to put tangible number to what I’m saying, check out levels.io to see pay for both data scientists and software engineers of the same years of experience. SWE wins almost all the time. Why? Because they can tangibly show their work and impact. That’s what you need at the salary-negotiation table, not I worked super hard on this analysis that senior leadership didn’t like and have nothing to show for it. /shrug
Listen up you workaholics, your drug of a busy mind has biblical context! Just kidding, but there is truth in finding work that makes your want to work more. If this is you, consider yourself lucky and whether you like it or not, blessed by Jesus. If you do not like your work, and I mean your day flies by because you’re solving interesting problems, then leave and find one. Or maybe find one then leave lol. I have found myself at a late-stage startup and I have a ton of fun here. I learn so much and I’m constantly feeling like I don’t 100% know the answer to things - that’s where the fun is baby.
Modal is such a cool tool that allows you to deploy apps in the cloud with like 10 lines of extra code. This is epic and I think I’ll write a whole article on my progress with is. For example, I have a silly Zillow web scraper deployed on Modal. What that means is that I don’t need my laptop on, it’s runs every day, and it exports my data into cloud storage.
This article by my new crush Erik Bernhardsson, and founder of Modal, give a better overview of the project. Seriously go check this out and thank me in the comments.
That’s all of what I consider notable for this week. Of course, I have more trolling on my Tweetor, so give me a phat follow and DM me or something.
/wave