Bloomberg SWE interview complete! Loved my interviewer and how the problem progressed in difficulty. I did start out with a brute force matrix traversal using index calculations for a distance problem, but as the problem got more complex I realized that a graph traversal algorithm would be a better solution. Unfortunately in the heat of the moment I was reaching for Dijkstra‘s instead of a simple BFS but at least I saw the optimization. Overall I’m proud I kept my cool and got a working solution
Finally taking on a mega refactor tonight. My client’s data processing pipeline has grown into a monster over the past 8 months and I’m finally combing through to replace all the temporary patches that were making the data flow with concrete fixes. Fun night!
Authenticating a new GCP connection to an app is not something I’ve had to do yet and I wrestled with it until 2am last night trying different python packages, TLS/SSL connections, and certificates. Unfortunately because the hanging db connection is timing out my server, all the progress I’ve made on my website is stuck in dev and I redeployed the scaffold version so that the domain opens something 🙄 Can Jim Beat Aleks in Rummy? will be live soon (I hope)!
Put together a scope of work/estimate for my client and it’s hilarious how much time needed to be allocated for data gathering before the “real work” could actually start. Currently manually inserting critical missing datapoints through googling because it’s impossible to automate :yikes:
Since my iMac isn’t working, I’m moving my consulting repos to my Windows computer but issues with launching the Celery worker is forcing me to migrate further to a WSL so I can run these Linux tools ⚒️ 😭 🧰 I used to think tech compatibility issues were bad in audio engineering! 💀
iMac repair is partially successful: the new hard drive works but the fan is not operating even using manual control. Need to open it up again and troubleshoot the fan connection 🥲
New repo day! Love the feeling of starting a project from scratch. Going in to meet with Company Ventures today to discuss some feature analysis and back testing on the classification pipeline I built for them over the past 18 months with the goal of determining the factors that carry the most predictive value and improve the models further.
moved all my recent posts from X to mastodon :) (which is why everything is posted within a minute of each other)
Another LeetCode 75 study session in preparation for my 1st technical interview for SWE @ #Bloomberg happening Jan 27th!
Re: last post, I’m grateful to everyone who made command-line navigation cool. Suggestions have been made to remove this from the QC CS curriculum, but it saved me from losing 500gb of data that I hadn’t backed up before the crash. Don’t sleep on Linux or backups 😒
My 2019 iMac began crashing a month ago. 5 Apple techs could not pinpoint the issue. I’ve since been troubleshooting myself, running the OS on an external HD, & passing crash reports to an AI. All suggest the issue is the SSD. New one in mail & will attempt the replacement myself🖥️
Just ended a coffee chat with someone looking to break into the data industry. It was sobering evidence I’m not a noobie despite not landing my dream FT job yet. My closing advice was to keep hacking projects together w/out getting hung up on details. Visit & revisit > perfection
Happy New Year! My work-related social media goal: supplement resume details by posting the topics, tools, techniques, and technologies that I use while continuing to build my portfolio & work experience as a full stack data scientist