Looking back on July 2022: Finding my true self, at work and online

As a child I thought you would be a full adult at 18 or at least 22. Now I’m at 26 and OH MAN, I was so wrong. I know a few things about myself, but I’m learning so much more all the time. This last month in particular was a lot about reflecting and listening to my needs. Is it worth it to have a content-creating business next to a full time job? Talking about that full time job, do I like how this is going for me?

Y’all, graduating last year was definitely not the last challenging thing on my timeline…

Table of Contents

2 years of Instagram, 2 years of online presence!

2
Yes, I bought an inflatable number to celebrate πŸ˜€ It’s been 2 years since I posted my first picture on my Tech/Coding Instagram account

In July, on the 27th to be exact, it has been 2 years since I posted my first picture on my Instagram account. The community and encouragement I found there encouraged me to carefully extend to blogging here on my own website and even starting a YouTube channel!

If you want to read about my first year, I wrote about it here: My first year on Instagram as a coding account.

Year 2 in summary:
– my Instagram presence gave me the courage to start my YouTube channel
– I got my first small sponsorship 🀯 so far the only one πŸ€·πŸ»β€β™€οΈπŸ˜‚
– in the last year we grew from 3.5k to 17.5k people on Instagram which is starting to be hard to grasp
– more and more people from real life know about this secret online life now and I bet there are people from my personal life that are seeing this, which I don’t even know about πŸ‘€

It’s not all rainbows and roses though. Yes, I achieved some cool things, but I also had to face that this online-adventure is not a sprint, but a marathon. And do I want to keep training for marathons if I’m not even close to the fastest runners out there? For now, the answer is “yes”. I want to have this content to look back on, I want to experience how far I can go (as a “slow runner”) and I want to further explore my interests here online.

Who am I when I’m really authentically me? What makes me “me” at work?

At my work as a data science consultant, I finished my first client project at the end of June. Which left me hanging in July and made me question a lot of things in the down time.

If you’re not aware, in consulting we get assigned to client projects and then work for these clients for pretty much 40 hours per week. Sometimes we go straight from one project to the next, but at other times, like in my case right now, there is some down time. In this down time, we can improve our knowledge through online courses or self-study, help with acquiring more clients or work on internal projects.

After reflecting and having 1:1s with my manager I decided I

  • am interested in neural networks and current machine learning research
  • love sharing my experiences and knowledge through presentations and text and it’s time to live this at work, too, instead of hiding.
  • am a careful worker with a science-mindset. And that’s okay and can improve the team effort if managed correctly.
  • like to get things off my chest and build trust with the people I’m working with.

In summary: I want to be my authentic self at work and not pretend to be “Business”-Sarah. Whatever that was supposed to be. This will be a work in progress and it was scary to be so honest at work, but clarifying this goal for myself made me calmer.

I finally participated in a Kaggle challenge!

The July Plaground Challenge Banner, a monthly intro-challenge to the kaggle world

I set a goal and I achieved it! I wanted to give a Kaggle challenge a serious try for months now. Combined with my work downtime and a bit of determination this became a reality last month. I opted for the July playground challenge, which is a beginner-friendly data challenge, of which a new version is opened every month. Read more about it in my Machine Learning Study Plan for July 2022.

It was extremely helpful to get to play around with clustering algorithms and I got to share a lot with my colleagues as well, because clustering is used often in data science consulting in market analysis and customer segmentation. Many of the techniques used by the more successful Kagglers that helpfully uploaded their code were new to me, so this ended up a good learning opportunity.

Would highly recommend and I will definitely take a look at the August challenge as well.

Here is what I blogged this month

I know, I already talked about my content up there about Instagram, but there was a lot happening on this blog as well.

I published 5 posts in July:

This netted me a record number of pageviews of 1158 in July! Super cool, thank you if you were one of those πŸ™‚

What I’m looking forward to in August

  • Blogging even more! I will participate in a blogging-challenge, the blogging-decade, where the goal is to post 10 posts in 10 days. Be sure to check in between August 21st and 30th to see how I’m doing
  • Our summer company meeting. Due to many working remotely I haven’t met a lot of colleagues yet.
  • Going book-shopping and meeting friends!

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