Data Analytics Workouts

I was recently messaged by someone on LinkedIn, and since my response seemed full enough, I thought I'd share. Question I see that you also program in VBA but you have made the jump to .NET. Unfortunately, I have found C#/Excel coding to be quite slow and just wanted to hear about your experiences. Responses Slow? It depends on what you mean. Honest, I have had to make the pitch when building apps that it should be in .NET rather than VBA for speed. One particular app had a form that needed to fill about 20 dropdowns on load, so using async operations were essential. That same app, while executing one SQL statement in the foreground, also executed 2 background statements that filled panels. It wouldn't have performed well if done in VBA. If you mean that it takes longer, then yes, but that is a necessity for good code anyway. If you only need a local operation, non-threaded, that doesn't need to be used across the enterprise, VBA can make sense, but with .NET co...

My responses in a NY Times comment section for the book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson : #1 - Link Although I've been a software developer for 15 years, and for longer alternating between a project manager, team lead, or analyst, mostly in finance, and now with a cancer center, I found it funny that you blame the people doing the coding for not seeing the harm it could cause. First, most scientific advancement has dark elements, and it is usually not the science but how it is used and sold by business people that is the problem. This leads to the second problem, in that it is not coding that is in itself problematic, but specifically how technology is harnessed to sell. It is normal and desirable to track users, to log actions, to collect telemetry, so as to monitor systems, respond to errors, and to develop new features, but that normal engineering practice has been used to surveil users for the purpose of selling. Blaming ...