2015, Unfinished
30 December 2015
2015 is at an end. Each year I think on the events and patterns of the year, as a reflective practice. I grow and learn more when I use hindsight to my advantage.
Let’s start with the projects and work I didn’t do. I don’t have regrets, but I don’t if I would make the same choices, either.
Learn
As an aspiring polymath, I am always learning something new (and forgetting something old; cache eviction happens to humans too). Sadly, I was not able to learn a few things I aspired to:
- JavaScript and React.js
- Scala, in more depth
- C / C++
- Bayesian inference
Lesson: I didn’t devote significant time to these things. I didn’t even start learning most of them. I always felt I had something more important to do. So the real question is whether my sense of judgment is wise, day-to-day.
Understand
When I’m not spending time at work doing data science, I’m doing it at home, on side projects. My life is awesome that way.
- An analysis of fruits, vegetables and pesticide risks. The FDA shows which pesticides are present in what produce, but not the amount or the relative risk of those pesticides. What are the relative risks of different kinds of produce? Is buying organic safer? If so, how much?
- An analysis of California’s water supply and water usage problems. Why do farmers grow rice, or cotton, in an arid climate?
- Another analysis of car value. Can we predict the cost-per-mile to own any used car?
- An analysis of health costs
- An analysis of higher education choices to help students pick a college using data.
- An analysis of whether the upcoming merger of Group Health Cooperative and Kaiser Permanente will result in higher health-care costs for patients.
- An analysis of brilliant, productive people, and any unusual traits or habits. In particular, what do incredible people do that is statistically different from the average person?
Lesson: These projects didn’t get far because I didn’t have the time/inclination to pursue them over other ideas. Several of them, notably around health-care and people’s behavior, are limited by a lack of data that’s easily accessible.
Communicate
I didn’t update my blog much; I was usually chatting with on Twitter. I did maintain draft blog posts, mostly as a personal knowledgebase.
- A post on good privacy and security advice
- A multi-part post on ethical choices for software engineers, data scientists and others
- A post on the wisest lessons I’ve learned about software engineering, including software engineering as a craft
- A post on the wisest lessons I’ve learned about job searches
- A post on the wisest lessons I’ve learned about data analysis, machine learning, statistics, and data science and feature engineering.
- A post on the value of the precautionary principle and systems thinking
- A post on the value of playing music as a way to keep learning, forever
- A post on using curiosity as a way to learn more without having your confidence/ego threatened
- A post on thinking of life as a linear optimization problem
- A post about project planning methods and approaches.
Lesson: This year I was more intentional about communication, and focused on back-and-forth communication (Twitter) rather than one-way communication (a blog).
Reflect
A few lessons and changes are apparent from this year.
- For analysis projects, make sure I care enough to start one. Use cleaned-up / available data sets when possible
- Be intentional with larger-scale projects and efforts. There isn’t time to do very many of them.
- For everything else, go for incremental improvement over what others have done.
- Change the format of my blog to be more collaborative. Hosting IPython notebooks would be a great start.