Category: Video

How to Become a Data Scientist in 6 Months a Hacker’s Approach to Career Planning

I’ve been digging around for some good presentations, giving a listen to some videos from PyData London 2016. Out of the videos I watched, I chose this talk by Tetiana Ivanova. This is a good talk for those looking to get into working as a data scientist. Here’s a few notes I made while watching the video.

Why did Tetiana hack here career? Well, first off, she was a mathematician she wanted to get out of that world of academia and make a change.

…more, including references and links, below the video…

Why does our society support higher education? Tetiana points emphasizes a number of things that that interline in a person’s life such as social pressure, historical changes, prestige, and status signaling to dictate their career options and provide choices in direction. I found this fascinating as I’ve read about, and routinely notice that higher education at an established and known school is largely about prestige and status signaling more than the actual education itself. As we see all the time in society, people will gain a position of status and power all too often based on the prestige and status arbitrarily associated with them because they went to this school or that school or some Ivy League fancy pants school.

But wrap all that up, and Tetiana outlines an important detail, “Prestige is exploitable!”

There’s also some hard realities Tetiana bullet points in a slide that I found worthy of note.

  • Set a realistic time frame.
  • Don’t trust yourself with sticking to deadlines.
  • Make a study plan.
  • Prepare for uncertainty.

I can’t draw enough emphasis to this list. There are also two points that I’d like to point out even more detail.

First is “don’t trust yourself with sticking to deadlines“. The second is “prepare for uncertainty“. If you expect to meet all your deadlines, you are going to dramatically increase your need to prepare for uncertainty. Because you will simply not meet all of your deadlines. For many of us we won’t meet most of our deadlines, let alone all of the deadlines.

Tetiana continues to cover a number of details around willpower, self management and self organization, and an insightful take on the topic of nerd networking. Watch the talk, it’s a good one and will provide a lot of insight, from a clearly introspective and intelligent individual, into clearing and stepping into a data science – or possibly other – career path!

References:

Jonathan Ellis talks about Five Lessons in Distributed Databases

Notes on the talk…

  1. If it’s not SQL it’s not a database. Watch, you’ll get to hear why… ha!

Then Jonathan covers the recent history (sort of recent, the last ~20ish years) of the industry and how we’ve gotten to this point in database technology.

  1. It takes 5+ years to build a database.

Also the tens of millions of dollars with that period of time. Both are needed, in droves, time and money.

…more below the video.

  1. The customer is always right.

Even when they’re clearly wrong, they’re largely right.

For number 4 and 5 you’ll have to watch the video. Lot’s good stuff in this video including comparisons of Cosmos, Dynamo DB, Apache Cassandra, DataStax Enterprise, and how these distributed databases work, their performance (3rd Party metrics are shown) and more details!

7 Tips for Creating Technical Content on The Open Source Show

I’m in a video with the rad Christina Warren!

In this video we walk about 7 tips for creating technical content in a kind of rapid fire back and forth of ideas. Recording this was great, as the way we did it presented us with a chance to put these ideas together like this. Being that both of us have presented and helped people out presenting a few more times then we’ve been able to keep a count of, the crew leading this endeavor basically said, “start brainstorming” as if the show is live. We did that, and it worked rather well. Then the artists, animators, and crew went to work splicing and dicing the video into this watchable format! Lotsa fun, enjoy.

For each of these I’ve elaborated on in the past.

Those 7 Tips for Creating Technical Content

  1. Always be learning!
  2. Know your audience.
  3. Bring ALL the connectors.
  4. Backup, backup, backup your presentations.
  5. Write continuously, regularly, and tell yourself a story.
  6. Try tutorials on a fresh machine.
  7. Observe how people create and present content.

Even more details on all these in the future.

References:

 

 

New Live Coding Streams and Episodes!

I’ve been working away in Valhalla on the next episodes of Thrashing Code TV and subsequent content for upcoming Thrashing Code Sessions on Twitch (follow) and Youtube (subscribe). The following I’ve broken into the main streams and shows that I’ll be putting together over the next days, weeks, and months and links to sessions and shows already recorded. If you’ve got any ideas, questions, thoughts, just send them my way.

Colligere (Next Session)

Coding has been going a little slow, in light of other priorities and all, but it’ll still be one of the featured projects I’ll be working on. Past episodes are available here, however join in on Friday and I’ll catch everybody up, so you can skip past episodes if you aren’t after specific details and just want to join in on future work and sessions.

In this next session, this Friday the 9th at 3:33pm PST, I’m going to be working on reading in JSON, determining what type of structure the JSON should be unmarshalled into, and how best to make that determination through logic and flow.

Since Go needs something to unmarshall JSON into, a specific structure, I’ll be working on determining a good way to pre-read information in the schema configuration files (detailed in the issue listed below) so that a logic flow can be implemented that will then begin the standard Go JSON unmarshalling of the object. So this will likely end up including some hackery around reading in JSON without the assistance of the Go JSON library. Join in and check out what solution(s) I come up with.

The specific issue I’ll be working on is located on Github here. These sessions I’m going to continue working on, but will be a little vague and will start working on the Colligere CLI primarily on Saturday’s at 10am. So you can put that on your schedule and join me then for hacks. If you’d like to contribute, as always, reach out via here, @Adron, or via the Github Colligere Repository and let’s discuss what you’d like to add.

Getting Started with Go

This set of sessions, which I’ve detailed in “Getting Started with Go“, I’ll be starting on January 12th at 4pm PST. You can get the full outline and further details of what I’ll be covering on my “Getting Started with Go” page and of course the first of these sessions I’ve posted details on the Twitch event page here.

  • Packages & the Go Tool – import paths, package declarations, blank imports, naming, and more.
  • Structure – names, declarations, variables, assignments, scope, etc., etc.
  • Basic Types – integers, floats, complex numbers, booleans, strings, and constants.

Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Apache Cassandra

I’ll be continuing the Terraform, bash, and related configuration and coding of using infrastructure as code practices to build out, maintain, and operate Apache Cassandra distributed database clusters. At some point I’ll likely add Kubernetes, some additional on the metal cluster systems and start looking at Kubernetes Operators and how one can manage distributed systems on Kubernetes using this on the metal environment. But for now, these sessions will continue real soon as we’ve got some systems to build!

Existing episodes of this series you can check out here.

Getting Started with Multi-model Databases

This set of sessions I’ve detailed in “Getting Started with a Multi-model Database“, and this one I’ll be starting in the new years also. Here’s the short run down of the next several streams. So stay tuned, subscribe or follow my Twitch and Youtube and of course subscribe to the Composite Code blog (should be to the left, or if on mobile click the little vertical ellipses button)

  1. An introduction to a range of databases: Apache Cassandra, Postgresql and SQL Server, Neo4j, and … in memory database. Kind of like 7 Databases in 7 Weeks but a bunch of databases in just a short session!
  2. An Introduction – Apache Cassandra and what it is, how to get a minimal cluster started, options for deploying something quickly to try it out.
  3. Adding to Apache Cassandra with DataStax Enterprise, gaining analytics, graph, and search. In this session I’ll dive into what each of these capabilities within DataStax Enterprise give us and how the architecture all fits together.
  4. Deployment of Apache Cassandra and getting a cluster built. Options around ways to effectively deploy and maintain Apache Cassandra in production.
  5. Moving to DataStax Enterprise (DSE) from Apache Cassandra. Getting a DSE Cluster up and running with OpsCenter, Lifecycle Manager (LCM), and getting some queries tried out with Studio.

Baseline Collateral for Useful Video Streaming

This post I’m making just to outline, and provide future reference, of a few things I’ve realized between this post about what you dear readers want and things that would make my video streams more useful, plus what content would be more useful. I’ve taken this survey (which you can still fill out your two cents) and what I’ve learned form it, combined that with what I’ve learned with doing some Twitch and YouTube streaming and prepared to introduce better content, with more details and related samples, along with the streaming I’ve been doing. With that, here’s an outline of the basic collateral I’m going to produce for every single streaming session I do from now on.

Per Stream Per Video Collateral

  1. I’ll post updates with content and objectives overview for each session well before the actual session that I schedule. So that there’s a blog entry with the next dozen or so sessions, plus the events will be listed on Twitch here. So subscribe to my Twitch channel @adronhall if you want to get updates when I go live!
  2. The full unedited video will be on Youtube here. Subscribe to get updates when the stream goes live on Youtube and to be notified when they post. With each video after it is recorded I will provide a timeline of topics covered for each video that goes live on Youtube. Similar to the timeline in this session or this session.
  3. I’ll post a post-stream blog post with the stream link on Youtube, the timeline, and a write up of the code, repositories, and any other collateral that goes along with the stream session. That way everybody will have access to a quick way of getting caught back up, review streams they’ve watched, and reuse or refer to the material after the stream is over for implementation or other use.
  4. I’ll also endeavor to cut out slices of the video into smaller multiple minute segments for specific how-to videos on how I’ve put together certain things, written certain pieces of code, configured things, or otherwise useful little segments. These segments, which I don’t have an example just yet, will be somewhere around 30 seconds to less than 5 minutes. Hopefully quickly watchable and useful.

I’m looking forward to these new sessions and the collateral I’m planning to put together. It ought to be good material and I hope you find it useful. Cheers! \m/