On NaBloPoMo Failure and Caldo Verde

dear lord this is an ugly picture

I have unsurprisingly failed in my NaBloPoMo quest. This has happened a lot more now than it did before. I think some of it was the encouragement I had when I actually knew other bloggers in Austin. A lot of it is because the seasons in my life have changed and my energy is directed elsewhere. I've been going to data science and machine learning meet ups whenever I can. I've been trying to attend community-building events to learn more about creating a diverse and inclusive culture both at my company and in tech in general. These do not leave much time for blogging, or cooking for that matter. Colby bears the brunt of the domestic responsibilities and I am very glad that he can cook.

I've been thinking about priorities a lot lately. I spend 2-4 nights per week doing after-work extracurricular activities. It's meant that I've been spending a lot of my mental capital on that and not on other things that I used to do (hello, paper crafting). It's also meant that I don't sleep and haven't been to my insanely expensive exercise place in 2 weeks (hello, Crossfit). This results in very quiet weekends. This isn't a bad thing, except that my weekends used to be the most interesting part of my week. Instead, I've been spending a lot of time snuggling with Ramona, watching Bob Ross, and catching up on my sleep.

The best part about quiet weekends has been that it's gotten much colder. This means that snuggling under piles of blankets is not uncomfortable and that soup for dinner is totally legit. This weekend, PBS Create had a soup-centric theme and that was awesome. America's Test Kitchen highlighted a recipe for caldo verde and it was amazing with nothing more than a side of crusty San Francisco sourdough.

Data Science Meet Up Recap

nice picture of the back of someone's head. :) 

My favorite way to interact at conferences is twitter. It's easy to follow hashtags and use @messaging to connect with people. As a result, I often "meet" people on twitter and never really meet them in real life. Today I went to a data science meet up and got to actually meet someone I've been interacting with on twitter since SciPy.

The meet up was basically an intro to data science. We talked about why data science is having a moment, what the data science work flow looks like, and what skills are crucial in being an effective data scientist. We then went through a tutorial using a Jupyter notebook, scikit-learn, and the iris data set. I've actually given a tutorial in a research seminar using that data set, so I didn't really gain much technical insight out of this; however, I did come to this realization:

The amount of machine learning one needs to understand to use SKLearn is very low. This is both wonderful and dangerous. #datascience

— julie k h (@jkru) November 3, 2015

I also got to hang out with Sonya, Michelle and Michael, and some Hackbright grads, while meeting other people who are interested both in data science and building a culture of inclusion in the tech industry. Quality way to spend an evening.

Home Makings and Other Announcements

I've been thinking about Austin a lot lately. I miss being part of a community that I know by heart and being close to so many of my good friends. One of the biggest differences between Austin and the Bay Area is that everything that I "need" is spread out here, whereas I could almost find everything I could possibly want north of the Colorado River in Austin.

Watercolor maps are awesome.

One of the biggest challenges is to find a replacement for Central Market. As absolutely ridiculous as it sounds, Central Market played a big role in our lives. We played on the playground and watched the turtles in the pond. We used it as a space to get to know people who would become dear friends. I worked on my thesis while drinking iced lattes and liters of mineral water. And even more plainly, we shopped for our groceries there. I miss being able to find the ingredients I cooked with in my Austin kitchens (my kingdom for some Cento crushed tomatoes) and being able to create the meals that I've fed my family and friends for the past six years.

whole milk lattes. forever

We do need to work on making the Bay Area feel like home, though, because we'll be here for awhile. After Hackbright ended, I put some serious legwork into applying for jobs. I even had a twitter hashtag that I used like three times (#getajobjanuary).  I'm happy to report that I start work as a data scientist today. Wish me luck.