Introduction

If you can see this, then my first post on my own blog was successful! If I put the picture in the right folder and named everything correctly, you should see it above; that’s me, on the left, with my two zany kids. Another success!

I’ve built a few dynamic web sites before, but this is my first experience working with markdown and Hugo to build a static web site. There’s a bit of learning curve, but the learning curve is the best part. And that’s really what this blog is about.

Data Science

I spent 10 years at Thomson Financial / Thomson Reuters / Nasdaq in a role that I initially thought would involve complex quantitave analysis, but turned out to be simple comparative valuation with lots of editing by hand in Excel. I found early on that there was a lot of room for human error so I refined the process by learning how to build macros and write VBA scripts that automated the cleaning of financial data. I eventually had so many I had to build a toolbar (and then a ‘ribbon’) to contain them all. Oddly, I enjoyed that. Heck, I was proud of it! Soon, this empowered my teammates to run these analyses on their own, which opened me up to new and unusual client requests, involving valuation, technical analysis, and statistics. I found myself learning new concepts and re-learning old ones. A lot of the new skills I acquired laid the groundwork for what I eventually discovered was a budding interest in Data Science.

Documentation

This blog is intended to serve as something of a diary, documenting my learning process as I build skills and experience in Python and R - and whatever else I may find useful - to explore and draw insights from data.

Hopefully, this will be interesting to some and useful to others.

–dave