Unfortunately I was impacted by a layoff at my former company, Snapdocs, earlier this year. After taking a short break, I started a full throttle search for a new role. The job hunt definitely is difficult in this current atmoshpere. Given all the other layoffs and the dwindling openings available, I knew it was going to take time and determination. It was a full time job itself, working on networking, searching for jobs, applying for jobs (with customized resumes and cover letters), and preparing for interviews. The first couple interview cycles were a little rough with some rustiness on my part. But I started regaining that interviewing muscle memory and started not only getting more interview requests but getting further into the interview rounds.

Hello again! I took a small hiatus (re: several years) from this site but I am back! I was laid off from my job earlier this year and all of a sudden found myself with a lot more time on my hands. And while I have just started as the newest Data Scientist at Sprout Social (wooo!), I do have some posts lined up that I will be releasing soon. Some are inspired by interviews I had in the past few months and some are inspired by other things. Expect something soon!

I have been wanting to build a simple web app with some interactivety for a while now. I used a few different tutorials/demos to build this kind of app. Specifically, I used Bokeh, an interactive Javascript based visualization library, and Flask to build a web app and then deploy it to Heroku, a cloud platform for web apps (and more).

Sometime last week as I was looking at the NBA playoff match-ups a thought occurred to me. What if the NBA standings adopted a points system á la European soccer leagues instead of win percentage? One might ask what the difference even is and it is quite simple. The winner of a game is given three points while the loser gets none. Crucially, a tie game results in one point for both teams. Currently, of course, the NBA resolves ties with overtime periods until there is a winner. From here a simple ratio of games won by games played is calculated to rank teams.

An underrated city in Europe, Zürich is lively and vibrant and one of my favorite places to visit. I bring this up because as I was stumbling around (on the internet) I found a dataset of trees on the OpenData Zürich website. It turns out most of the urban trees are indexed and alongside some supplemental sources make up this public dataset. I have many fond memories of Zürich and its arboretum, so today I will take a rather quick look at the trees from Zürich using R.