In terms of code accomplishments, I would say the majority are actually “side projects” that I did at work but weren’t relevant to my day job. Specifically, I spent a lot of time re-learning R Shiny and made some pretty sweet dashboards, if I do say so myself. I’m actually using some of that knowledge for a personal project right now – I’m hoping I actually get that done so I can blog about it!

Anyway, job rambling under the cut:

My last job seemed promising (I sound so naive in my last post) but man did it ever crash and burn. You know how they say people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers? Yeah. That was me. I would’ve probably been happier had I stayed and learned how the hell web dev worked. I was extremely competent at what they wanted me to do, but it also still wasn’t data science.

Plus, I didn’t do any talks last year, which was probably one of my biggest disappointments. I think getting halfway through the year and realizing it just wasn’t going to happen was when it hit me that the job wasn’t the right spot for me. I’m an introvert and I hate talking to people, but I am good at doing talks and I like sharing knowledge! And doing talks is good for the career!

So once again, I am optimistic that my new role will be more fulfilling. I’m willing to do a lot of non-data-science bullshit, but I just don’t want to dread opening my laptop every morning. So far so good? It’s much better aligned to my interests, the manager came highly recommended by multiple people, and a colleague from this team actually tried to recruit me last year around this time but for obvious reasons, I couldn’t do anything.

So far, I’m the one yelling about code reusability and “why aren’t we using GitHub?!?!?!” which is… interesting, since I’m not a real developer. But I am on the product team, so I guess it works?

Once again, I hope that we can only go up from here, but I ended my last post on the same note, and it definitely went way, way, waaaay down. I guess at least I really learned how to compartmentalize work and personal lives, and I got very good at closing my laptop at 5pm?

#meta

But this is a code blog and this is a new year post, so let's instead talk about my various accomplishments from 2021 instead.

Last year, code-wise, I:

• started this blog!
• did the 2021 WiDS datathon!
• got reorged into a new role, and then found me a new role that is better suited to my strengths and capabilities
• played around with Django
• started working on spaced repetition system for my Korean learning for funsies, which ended up being more a “how to learn to make GUIs” than actually learning any Korean
• did two talks at work, Linguistics 101 for NLPers and one about lessons learned when productionizing the 7 models that my team built

I guess this is a pretty okay list. I could've done more, I could've done less, but I got through 2021, and one could consider than the greatest achievement, so... I'm happy about it.

I'm happy that I have this blog, and I'm happy I did the datathon. I'm hoping to do this year's datathon as well, but we'll see how life goes!

With the new role, I'm still at the bank! I got reorged mid-2021 because of my NLP experience and Linguistics minor – it was supposed to be a role where I would focus on NLP technology within the bank. However, it ended up as a team of data scientists trying to do web dev for a chatbot, taking over an existing code base that was poorly documented at best. I have zero knowledge of JavaScript or TypeScript or anything else that was being used, but programming languages are easy to pick up – I could read the code. The problem for me was that I had no web dev knowledge. I was floundering – like what the hell is a POST request? What's an end point? These are pretty basic concepts but my previous experience never needed me to know about these things.

Of course, I vaguely know about them now, but honestly, it's not my jam. This is why we have specialties! It's like how I knew I didn't want to do civil engineering (buildings? foundations? boring) in school, but I was so fascinated with my choice of engineering physics (rocket science? nuclear physics? fluid dynamics? give me more of that good stuff). And of course, now I'm in a software engineering field, so y'know. You end up doing things you didn't think about before, but it's still something I found interesting and something I worked to be good at.

Anyway, I quickly learned that it wasn't the right reorg for me, and luckily someone internally was looking for someone like me around the time I was looking to find a better place, so it all worked out. I'm quite happy about it! I did do a few external interviews through the year to see how things looked outside the bank, but I'm actually quite happy to stay here. It's not perfect, but what company is?

Django was interesting to look at because it did touch on the various web-dev-y things I was tasked with learning at work. I was actually hoping to use it to hook into the spaced repetition system that I was playing around with, but I'll be honest. Web things are just a pain in the ass to me. I don't understand it, and I don't want to put the work into understanding it because there are way more interesting (to me) things to work on!

But the SRS thing I was working on was pretty fun! I'm hoping to expand it with a “proper” (or at least functional) GUI at some point this year! I also don't understand how GUIs work (and making things look “pretty” is the worst thing you could ask me to do – I'm so bad at it), but it's cool to see how things come together.

I'm hoping to continue doing talks at work in 2022. Doing the linguistics talk 3 times last year was a lot, but I guess I'm really good at it now. People have also asked for more in-depth linguistics/NLP topics, so I'd love to find time to create those as well. Work-specific talks, I suppose, will depend on the work I'm doing, but I'm optimistic that I'll have some useful stuff eventually, though maybe not this year!

Anyway, it's a new year, and although it's already kinda crappy, hopefully we can go up from here.

#meta

#datascience > as a data scientist, I do the data science-y things on a regular basis

#meta > it's about this blog itself, or maybe about me, idk

#css > it's about CSS, and probably about the blog style

#wids2021 > Women in Data Science 2021: all about the conference and the datathon

... yeah.

Well, I bought the domain name and set up the blog, so let's see about that coding in my personal time! There's a lot of stuff I've been meaning to take a closer look at, and hopefully this will give me more incentive to do it.

#meta