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I’ve been an immigrant my whole life. This is a consequence of being born in Hong Kong to Malaysian parents, whilst mostly growing up in Australia. Moving to America was, on the surface, not that big of a change. I never felt that attached to any particular country growing up - never quite belonging anywhere. Read more
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It’s about one and a half years since I started my PhD. This is about the same amount of time that I spent working at Hivery, but in a way it feels much shorter. I’ve noticed that a PhD life tends to be much more intense, yet routine - the total effect being that the weeks tend to fly past. Projects tend to be much longer - my current one has been running since May - so they do little to demarcate the weeks. And often progress is slow and non-linear. Still, I am quite happy to wake up and go to work each day - certainly much happier than a comparable time back in Sydney. It’s partly due to the nature of the work, which is technical and interesting - but also partly because I am not beset with difficult problems without the ability to solve them. Read more
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So I’ve just finished a year in Baltimore and have returned to Perth. Here are some thoughts gathered over that time. Read more
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I’m leaving HIVERY to pursue a PhD in computer science, concluding a nearly 2 year engagement starting from an internship one seat to the left of where I sit today. I’ve been immensely privileged to have been afforded the opportunity of working at HIVERY - it is rare for a graduate to become a product lead in no less than two years. It has been a fun ride and I will miss it very much. Read more
Published:
I’m leaving HIVERY to pursue a PhD in computer science, concluding a nearly 2 year engagement starting from an internship one seat to the left of where I sit today. I’ve been immensely privileged to have been afforded the opportunity of working at HIVERY - it is rare for a graduate to become a product lead in no less than two years. It has been a fun ride and I will miss it very much. Read more
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There’s this project management idea called the ‘bus factor’ - the number of people in a project that need to be hit by a bus for the project to stall. For instance, I work on a project where I am the only data scientist. Should I meet this proverbial bus, the project would stop. Thus the project I am on has a bus factor of 1. Note that this is not necessarily true for other members of my project. For example, the project manager, UX designer, or the backend architect could probably be replaced or rotated off the project with minimal disruption. Read more
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Clients pay your bills so they make the rules, in theory. In practice it’s only necessary that they feel they’ve made the rules - as a data scientist I can influence what the rules might be. Oftentimes clients are difficult out of ignorance. People who aren’t aware of the technical work required to create simple functionality can complain that progress is slow. It’s important to highlight why things take a long time (at the appropriate level of complexity, of course). Read more
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Working over the last several months, I’ve encountered several management styles as part of my duties as a data scientist. It’s impossible to do everything by yourself, and so managing other data scientists is something that inenvitably happens. Let’s talk about problem solving approaches. Read more
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I’ve just set up this whole page using GitHub pages, a helpful Jekyll template (forked from a fork of Minimal Mistakes), and a domain purchased on NameCheap (which has worked fabulously so far). Only cost me $40 all up for four years! Read more