As 2013 comes to a close, trying to succinctly wrangle the dense whirlwind of the past 300+ days is almost impossible. Most recently I’ve discovered a possible career angle to pursue – Operations Research. In that pursuit, I ran through a really great R tutorial sponsored by O’Reilly: Try R. R allows manipulation of files like tables and has a clean treatment of statistical functions and plotting. The tutorial shows R’s handiness to the data scientist, and I’m pretty excited about doing more advanced examples. So excited that I’ve signed up for an upcoming Coursera class taught by Dr. Peng of Johns Hopkins University, Computing for Data Analysis.
In addition to extracurricular learning, I’m looking forward to polishing my existing data warehouse objects as well as expanding on the operations-oriented stats we are currently providing. My goal is to present the analytic power of dimensional modeling at the enterprise level, spurring a larger impact across the organization. While I do enjoy the DW/BI stack, talking with Mr. Kimball at the Kimball Dimensional Modeling course really inspired me to pursue my interests in statistical modeling and visualization.
To top all that off, I’ve taken the plunge (at least temporarily) into teleworking from my house in Alabama. In reality the technical side of my daily operations are virtually unchanged, the political side shall remain to be seen. And of course there are many nuances of a desk change that have to be resolved on top of unpacking.
Oh and to top all that off, I will begin working on my first short story in 2014. Amazon’s Self-Publishing seems to be a great way to get my work published and promoted for free! (Not counting the 30-65% they scrape off, of course.)
bowdenc 