Still in love with the new toy
Nov. 2nd, 2017 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenayI still love my MacBook. This may not change for a long time. It's so pretty. And it works so beautifully and quickly. There are so many little things it does that I hadn't realised I'd love! It's so easy!
Er, sometimes a little too easy *blushes* I spent ages last week trying to set up printers, because it was so simple that I couldn't believe it and I kept looking for something far more complicated. Heh.
I have Scrivener installed and I've been powering on with the novel. Scriv is lovely on a Mac and it's so comfortable to write that I've been getting down words much faster than I expected. I suspect that at some point my progress will slow, but so far, it's been great. It probably helps that I'm really enjoying writing this book and I'm at the stage where I feel settled into the rhythm and voices, but I haven't hit the muddy middle section where I start to doubt why anyone would ever want to write.
The first chapter went through my crit group at the weekend and they were really helpful. This is the first time I've written first person POV for over a decade, so I needed some feedback on that. Overall, apparently I'm not doing badly, and they were able to point me to places where it wasn't quite working (third person POV habits holdover) and explain why, so I can fix it. Knowing why something isn't working helps so much, maybe more than knowing what isn't working in the first place.
The funny part was all the places where they had to check whether something I'd said was a Britishism they hadn't heard of before. Apparently I disabused them of the notion that they're familiar with British terminology and slang :-D
Also, they know my writing well enough now to be unable to make any assumptions, because I keep smashing heteronormativity all over the place so they don't know what to expect. I feel proud of this. Let's keep breaking heteronormative stereotypes into pieces, okay?
The other fun thing on the new computer is some coding work. I've been doing a course from FutureLearn on coding for data analysis, which has involved python and jupyter notebooks, and using Anaconda to manage packages and environments. Anaconda is making all that set-up really easy, so I got up and running with it in a very short amount of time. Python is new for me, but I'm having fun with it. Most of the work has been with the pandas library, which is really cool, but I'm not sure how people without any programming background are managing because it really is a crash course in coding. I'm managing okay, but this isn't my first time with programming/scripting, and Python follows a lot of the paradigms I remember from Java and Smalltalk. It makes sense in a really nice way.
Most of the people on the course are bitching and moaning about arrays with indexes that start at zero. I'm having little happy dances because that's how they're supposed to work :-D
After the course ends, I plan to do a deep dive into Python basics and then return to the data analysis packages.
I like the notebooks concept a lot. It allows you to do exploratory analysis and record the logic you used to come to your conclusions, with the code sitting right there with all your notes. And then that can be organised into a presentation, still with the code and graphs sitting there, so other analysts can rerun the code and check your logic. It's a fab tool and I'm glad that I'm taking this course, because it's opened my eyes to a lot of tools and possibilities I hadn't seen before.
I've got a few more courses lined up along these lines. There's a visualization one (social media analysis, with Tableau for visualization) and a course on R and Hadoop. If this sounds like I'm considering edging into more of a data engineering/data scientist direction for my career...you might be right. It's something I'm investigating, anyway.
I'm starting to realise that as much as I like my company and the people I work with, my career has stalled a bit and I'd like to start moving again, but there aren't the opportunities where I currently work. My options are basically more of the same, but adding in people management, and while data warehousing is interesting, it isn't something I want to do exclusively for the rest of my life. I'm still noodling around what that means, but in the meantime, I'm taking courses and learning new skills, to give myself some new options. At least it's giving me better ideas on where I want to take my career, and I've discovered there are options out there that didn't exist a decade ago.
The only sad thing is that I'll probably have to leave my current company to do them, because they're years away from any significant analytics programme and getting further away with every cancelled toe-dipping exercise.
It's not something I need to do anything about for a while, though. There's stuff going on right now that mean learning and training is a higher priority than any kind of job hunt.
The one downside to my lovely MacBook is that I keep wanting to use trackpad gestures on my Windows PC at work and they don't work. Woe. But they're so convenient!
(I have a cold. Ugh. I don't approve. It's been here since *Monday* and I hates it, precious, I hates it.)
Er, sometimes a little too easy *blushes* I spent ages last week trying to set up printers, because it was so simple that I couldn't believe it and I kept looking for something far more complicated. Heh.
I have Scrivener installed and I've been powering on with the novel. Scriv is lovely on a Mac and it's so comfortable to write that I've been getting down words much faster than I expected. I suspect that at some point my progress will slow, but so far, it's been great. It probably helps that I'm really enjoying writing this book and I'm at the stage where I feel settled into the rhythm and voices, but I haven't hit the muddy middle section where I start to doubt why anyone would ever want to write.
The first chapter went through my crit group at the weekend and they were really helpful. This is the first time I've written first person POV for over a decade, so I needed some feedback on that. Overall, apparently I'm not doing badly, and they were able to point me to places where it wasn't quite working (third person POV habits holdover) and explain why, so I can fix it. Knowing why something isn't working helps so much, maybe more than knowing what isn't working in the first place.
The funny part was all the places where they had to check whether something I'd said was a Britishism they hadn't heard of before. Apparently I disabused them of the notion that they're familiar with British terminology and slang :-D
Also, they know my writing well enough now to be unable to make any assumptions, because I keep smashing heteronormativity all over the place so they don't know what to expect. I feel proud of this. Let's keep breaking heteronormative stereotypes into pieces, okay?
The other fun thing on the new computer is some coding work. I've been doing a course from FutureLearn on coding for data analysis, which has involved python and jupyter notebooks, and using Anaconda to manage packages and environments. Anaconda is making all that set-up really easy, so I got up and running with it in a very short amount of time. Python is new for me, but I'm having fun with it. Most of the work has been with the pandas library, which is really cool, but I'm not sure how people without any programming background are managing because it really is a crash course in coding. I'm managing okay, but this isn't my first time with programming/scripting, and Python follows a lot of the paradigms I remember from Java and Smalltalk. It makes sense in a really nice way.
Most of the people on the course are bitching and moaning about arrays with indexes that start at zero. I'm having little happy dances because that's how they're supposed to work :-D
After the course ends, I plan to do a deep dive into Python basics and then return to the data analysis packages.
I like the notebooks concept a lot. It allows you to do exploratory analysis and record the logic you used to come to your conclusions, with the code sitting right there with all your notes. And then that can be organised into a presentation, still with the code and graphs sitting there, so other analysts can rerun the code and check your logic. It's a fab tool and I'm glad that I'm taking this course, because it's opened my eyes to a lot of tools and possibilities I hadn't seen before.
I've got a few more courses lined up along these lines. There's a visualization one (social media analysis, with Tableau for visualization) and a course on R and Hadoop. If this sounds like I'm considering edging into more of a data engineering/data scientist direction for my career...you might be right. It's something I'm investigating, anyway.
I'm starting to realise that as much as I like my company and the people I work with, my career has stalled a bit and I'd like to start moving again, but there aren't the opportunities where I currently work. My options are basically more of the same, but adding in people management, and while data warehousing is interesting, it isn't something I want to do exclusively for the rest of my life. I'm still noodling around what that means, but in the meantime, I'm taking courses and learning new skills, to give myself some new options. At least it's giving me better ideas on where I want to take my career, and I've discovered there are options out there that didn't exist a decade ago.
The only sad thing is that I'll probably have to leave my current company to do them, because they're years away from any significant analytics programme and getting further away with every cancelled toe-dipping exercise.
It's not something I need to do anything about for a while, though. There's stuff going on right now that mean learning and training is a higher priority than any kind of job hunt.
The one downside to my lovely MacBook is that I keep wanting to use trackpad gestures on my Windows PC at work and they don't work. Woe. But they're so convenient!
(I have a cold. Ugh. I don't approve. It's been here since *Monday* and I hates it, precious, I hates it.)
no subject
Date: 2017-11-04 02:48 pm (UTC)