It’s always amazing how you think your life is incredibly boring until you write a wrap-up like this post and realize that stuff actually happened!!
This month, “stuff” included a mini vacation (or workation?), a “first” at work (I work as a Data Science Consultant, check this post if you want to know what that is) and challenging myself personally for everyone to see (absolutely terrifying).
Table of Contents
- Working from abroad
- Never ending data warehouses and finishing my first project as a Data Science Consultant
- Reviving this blog by jumping into a blogging bootcamp
- This month’s blog posts
- My first concert: Lorde
Working from abroad
Okay, calling a location 3 hours away from home “abroad” makes it sound more exciting than it is, but technically it’s true. In the middle of June I used the flexibility of remote working to just pack our bags and drive to a vacation home at the sea. On the way home I answered messages from the car in the morning and jumped right into a meeting with my senior colleague and a following client meeting within an hour of parking the car.
It was a bit hectic, especially with the meeting right after arriving home, but I really enjoyed walks by the water and just being away from home and all the usual distractions and worries for a bit. Just being in nature and not filling every free second with more work (what, me, a workaholic? Never…).
Never ending data warehouses and finishing my first project as a Data Science Consultant
Since March of this year I have been on a team involved with a project building up a database for reporting business numbers for a client of the company I work at. The client is dealing with billing and subscription payments and making sure those are paid, which includes sending out warnings and following up on them. This data needed to be analyzed and some roughly defined questions should be answered to enable the businesses to potentially make improvements on their payment process, like adjusting how many warnings are sent out. (Remind me to make a full post about this soon, please)
This month was the last month of the small project and as part of our deliverables we were building a data warehouse prototype building on the existing SAP data that would make building reports way easier. Working together with our companies experts on data warehouses made me learn a lot about the best practices in the area. And while I’m glad I now know what a data warehouse is (spoiler: as most things in business it sounds way more fancy than it actually is), I’m also glad that I now have a break from looking at SQL all day. Give me back my Python and theory, please.
Which brings me to the fact, that yesterday (on July 1st to be exact, strictly speaking not in June) I uploaded all our files to the clients Bitbucket and handed over the project. We might have some follow up appointments to help out with questions that might come up, but for all intents and purposes the project is done now, which was a weird feeling. A bit like handing in an assignment in uni, but now someone else has to deal with our code and thoughts and use it in their business.
Reviving this blog by jumping into a blogging bootcamp
After participating in a free one-week blogging challenge last month – which created this blog post about my journey into data science – I decided to finally take my on-off-relationship with content creation (and self doubt) serious and jump into a (paid) 9 week blogging challenge with the goal of writing a weekly blog post. So far, we can definitely call it a success because I published 4 blog posts in one month, which has never happened in a month so far! (With the only exception of last December when I did a few posts on the first 5 days of advent of code, but those were exclusively coding posts and pretty monotonous)
I struggle a lot with imposter syndrome when it comes to creating content, but in this challenge I can just go “Okay, Judith said we should write about X, so I will do just that, surely she knows what she’s doing” and even feel accomplished. Thinking about it, I probably still need to feel like in university when there was clearly defined coursework that you either finished or you didn’t. Being partly self-employed as a content creator is very different from that and I’m still growing into it and learning to trust my own process.
This month’s blog posts
- How to present data in context – Chapter 1 Summary Storytelling with Data
- What is validation data used for? – Machine Learning Basics
- 5 Tips for Studying Math at University Level
- Are Decision Trees the Siblings of Neural Networks? – Interesting research
My first concert: Lorde
In personal news, I finally went to my first ever concert with my best friend. It was a little bittersweet because my first concert ticket was actually a Taylor Swift ticket for June 2020, but you can all imagine what happened to that event…
As a huge Swift-fan, this loss hit hard, but nevertheless the Lorde concert was incredibly fun and we even got a pretty sunset right as the show was ending. Given that Lorde’s newest album is called Solar Power, that was quite fitting.
