2023: My Career Retrospective

Dec 31, 2023
  • Updates

Last year was packed with milestones:

  1. It was my 3rd consecutive year as an industry ds!

  2. I started my second consecutive year at my last job!

  3. I aced my first industry review, and got my first raise!

  4. I deployed my first DS model into production!

  5. I managed (end to end) my first model expansion project!

  6. I deepened my practical skills using; Python, HTML, CSS, SQL, Azure Cloud Infra., Infra-as-code, PySpark, Databricks Platform, Powershell, Octopus Deploy, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes, Adobe Airflow, Polars, MLFlow, FastAPI, Streamlit, PowerBI, GitHub Co-Pilot, Pytorch Geometric and so, so, much more!

But …

  1. It the first time I have ever been through layoffs! 😿

Sept. (2023): I survived 4 rounds of layoffs, before it was my turn…

It was … well … very hard. I have been in education, or had a job, consistently since 2012. This was new territory for me, and as much as I told myself it wasn’t my fault; it still hurt. I still had questions, and personal doubts:

I was fortunate to have people to support me, talk to, and rely on to help me navigate those first three questions. That last question, still troubles me.

“How will I find a new job in a down market?”

Week 1 Post-Layoff

  1. While it was still fresh, I wrote down EVERYTHING I did at my last job.

  2. I updated my resume, and revised it multiple times, then got feedback and revisions from a professional.

  3. I wrote down what I wanted from my next job, e.g.,
    • Industry: Video Games, Insurance, Finance, Tech, Logistics, etc.
    • Job title: Data Scientist, Senior Data Scientist
    • Base Comp: For example, $130k to $140k

  4. I applied for some ‘low-hanging fruit’ opportunities to test my resume

  5. I took a long break

Oct. (2023): I needed a break, and I was lucky enough to be able to take one.

I was fortunate that I could take time off. I raced to get all of my knowledge on paper before I did this. This was intentional, so that when I was ready to go back, all of my material was there. I made sure my resume was field tested, and was getting responses, BEFORE my break also. This gave me some peace-of-mind, so I could take at least a few weeks of meaningful time off.

Nov. (2023): Let the search 🔎, begin!

I began applying in bursts, sending out applications, seeing responses, and then making small adjustments to my resume to improve my hit rate. I eventually found a good balance, and by the end of the month I was interviewing!

In the meantime, I was also working on some up-skilling:

Dec. (2023) | Interviewing & ‘Up Skilling’

Up skilling

Prototyping the Front End 😃

I made lots of good progress, on my new website. By the beginning of the month, I had managed to build the front end, with all of the pages, but they were all still using dummy data from the backend API.

Developing the Back End ☠️

I decided early on, I wanted to learn how to use SQLAlchemy, and leverage ORM patterns to build my own CRUD interfaces. As I had ZERO web dev experience, this proved to be challenging, I ended up rewriting this code several times. Not to mention, I decided midway to use Pydantic, resulting in more learning, and another refactor!

Then, in my infinite wisdom, once I had the SQlite database working nicely with my CRUD patterns (including data validation). I said:

💡 “Wow, this is great. But, what if I wanted to restrict access to certain routes to only people with certain privileges, like on azure portal!”

So then, I had to learn about auth, JWT tokens, encryption … I managed to get all of this working, then I got burned out on it. Moral of the story, feature creep is real. I will go back to this project, but I needed a break. Plus, at the time I was interviewing more, and doing take-home challenges, so I had to switch up priorities.

Holiday Break and just-before-New Years resolution!

My remaining interviews were on hold over the break. So I decided to take a break too. At least, a break from thinking about work prep, and up-skilling.

I learned a lot in 2023. A LOT! But, I felt myself not always enjoying what I was doing. So, I decided this time, if I was going to learn something new, it had to satisfy at least one other aspect of my life, other than professional.

Anybody who knows me, knows that aside from a science nerd 🤓 (of which I am a gigantic one), I am also a huge technology 🖥️ nerd, and I love video games. I also like to build things, whether physical (like my PC), or digital.

This time, I wanted to marry my passions for science, tech, and programming. So I decided, I was going to learn how to build video games 🎮 in my spare time.