As a freelance data scientist, I use time between client engagements to up-skill and pursue professional interests that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
At the end of the summer I had time between engagements to work on some side projects and grapple with some new (to me) libraries and technologies.
During August and September 2019, I:
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Practiced creating websites using the Django web-framework
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Investigated and demo’ed django-plotly-dash - a library that allows exposing Plotly Dash apps to django projects
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Built a personal finance dashboard using Plotly Dash and began turning it into a web app using Django and django-plotly-dash.
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Interviewed for a role at CoinMetrics.io and created this investigation as a technical exercise.
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Created a company “Atlas Consulting Internatonal” to facilitate life as a freelance data scientist and consultant.
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Spent a lot of time working at the cafe in IKEA because my co-working space wouldn’t let me stay late or work on public holidays
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Introduced myself to this new coworking space and suggested we could work together to create the best tech-focussed startup hub and coworking space in the Netherlands.
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Bought our first car. It required a lot more time and research than I expected.
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Created Texni Data Consultancy with Dan Caputo to provide data strategy consultancy services.
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Built the website for Texni Data using django and deployed it to Heroku with a custom domain name.
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Deployed a django app to Google Cloud Platform using App Engine.
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Created a business website to represent my work as a freelance data scientist and made my blog a subdomain of this site.
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Moved my blog off of github pages and onto firebase. Thanks Github for several years of simple trouble free hosting.
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Experimented with using storage buckets on Google Cloud Platform to host static sites and serve them over SSL. My conclusion is that serving static sites using storage buckets is great - it’s simple, quick and cheap (free). But adding SSL proved too difficult. I spent too many hours trying to create a loadbalancer that would work for both the root domain johnmathews.is and also a subdomain blog.johnmathews.is. In the end I found out about firebase. Firebase is also quick and cheap (free) and simple enough to pick-up quickly.
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Created a photo book using PhotoBox that turned out great. It covers the last 3.5 years and is mostly full of snapshots of our kids and selfies with Ritsya.
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Chose a primary school for my daughter to go to next year.