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 ...

Even before AI, I would have thought that work being done now would be automated, and of course, AI will replace some work - since developers automate tasks themselves, using rules, patterns, and processes - but the idea is always to stay ahead of the 'crushing wave' of new tech, often automating oneself out fo a job, thereby keeping your job... BTW, this mentions interesting tools leveraging AI to help coders, rather than simply replacing them, since the latter is not currently a realistic scenario. Source: Will A.I. Take Over Your Programming Job?

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell My rating: 4 of 5 stars I enjoy reading in systems and complexity, and this was a nice addition to my shelf, with a slightly different take than other books. I found a few areas in the first half a bit tedious, overly long, repetitive, and not illuminating, but generally, it's a great overview of seminal work and very thought-provoking. The first half overlaps but nicely differs from other books I've read, covering things like chaos and information processing, and the latter half of the book I found more engaging, focused on models, computation, network science, and scaling. As mentioned, although I found the first half a bit of a slog at times, the second half was very engaging. View all my reviews

My corporate annual review period recently passed, and I was reminded of all the skills developed and completed tasks over the past year, both in and out of work. Sincerely, remembering what I've done over the past year makes me feel good, and really reminds me of how much I enjoy learning. Video Courses Although largely focused on reading to learn, I do partake of various streaming video resources via Pluralsight. The courses I've completed this past year: Multiple courses on management and leadership Developer to Manager Technical Writing: Documentation on Software Projects Quantitative & AI-related courses, accompanied by work in R, Python, or VBA Understanding Machine Learning Understanding Machine Learning with R Data Mining Algorithms in SSAS, Excel, and R Understanding and Applying Logistic Regression Understanding and Applying Factor Analysis and PCA Understanding and Applying Financial Risk Modeling Techniques Books Software Development ...

Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life by John H. Miller My rating: 4 of 5 stars A thought-provoking introductory exploration to modeling social systems, covering ideas for rule-based agents within a variety of rule-based systems, moving onto evolutionary-like automata and organization of agents to solve problems. Underlying some of the ideas, one could see references to deeper concepts, e.g., nonlinearity, attractors, emergence, and complexity, none of which was explained explicitly. At times, I did find the writing tedious, as some ideas were too obvious to spend time detailing, but overall, a well-written easy to digest text. View all my reviews

Although I've made many posts on my Data Analytics Workouts site, some generated more interest than others - nothing here was virally popular - and below are a handful of the most popular, sorted in descending order of views: Charting Correlation Matrices in R (877) Neural Networks (Part 4 of 4) - R Packages and Resources (507) Performance Improvements in R: Vectorization & Memoisation (322) Naive Bayes on Political Outcome Based on State-level Big Five Assessment (263) Decision Trees on Political Outcome Based on State-level Big Five Assessment (262) F# is Part of Microsoft's Data Science Workloads (223) Logistic Regression on Stock Data using Google and SPY (SPDR S&P 500) (196) Using Visual Studio Team Services for Personal Development (194) Microsoft Azure Notebooks - Live code - F#, R, and Python (186) Efficient R Programming - A Quick Review (178) Patents Per Capita and Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions (167) Comparing Performance in R Usin...