2016 Retrospective and 2017 Goals

2016 was a pretty good year. I transitioned away from an earlier stage of work life where I thought economics research was all I wanted to be doing. As it turns out, seeing how the research sausage gets made can be just as ugly as seeing how any other sausage gets made. After 18 months as a research assistant, I took a new job with more of a software development bent. For 2016 and again for 2017, I’ve tried picking out a few areas that I want to focus on in my reading, side projects, etc. Otherwise, I end up with way too much breadth and not enough depth. I’m probably still too far on the breadth side, but hey, there is always 2018…

2016 in Retrospect

Topics

• Coding best practices
• Statistical/Machine Learning
• GUI Programming

Books

• Code Complete
• Pragmatic Programmer
• Clean Code
• The C Programming Language
• Mastering Algorithms in C (partial)

Projects

• Build a workstation
• Personal Website
• Compete in a Kaggle competition

Coursework

• Intro to Statistical Learning
• Big Data Analysis with Apache Spark
• C Programming

2017 Goals

Topics

• Containers & Docker
• Bayesian Statistics
• Time Series Analysis
• Web programming
• Data Pipelines

Books

• Cython
• Big Data: Principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems
• Flask Web Development
• Think Bayes
• Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models
• Bayesian Data Analysis

Projects

• Set up home workstation as a server
• Contribute to an open source project
• Build a docker container image
• Compete in Kaggle’s Two Sigma code competition
• Build a simple analytics web app

Coursework

• Scaling Python for Big Data
• Deep Learning