As a data scientist at craftworks, things seldom get boring. Due to the constantly changing environments we work in, we end up gaining knowledge across a variety of domains, tools, and mindsets.

I never thought I’d be googling “difference between straw and hay”, yet here I am! I’m always grateful when our clients are patient and take the time to give us a better understanding of their domain. This way I’ve learned a bit more about metal manufacture, wood processing, supply chains, and yes, even cutting grass.

I think there is value to being an ‘outsider’, to get new perspectives on existing issues, and especially cross-pollinating that experience across industries.

There is nothing more gratifying to me at work than when customers come back and say “hey, we’re using your solution, and it’s helping us a lot!” Being able to see actual, real results, and solving people’s real problems is exactly why I love the work that I do.

Bit of infra work, bit of data engineering, bit of modeling, some deployment, frontend?! Those all sound like my tasks throughout a typical project! But no matter the language, tools, or framework, at the end it really comes down to creative thinking, problem solving and googling error messages. Although learning a new framework takes a bit of time, each time it gets a little bit faster, because the base of past experiences to draw from keeps growing. I’m always grateful for my colleagues’ patience and support during the time it takes for me to pick up new tools.

Anecdote: I recently experienced a big advantage of working cross-department, since I’m part of two teams of the same client — I had an issue in “team 1”, which normally I would have to ask someone to help me with, but since I’m also part of “team 2” I was able to assign it to myself and fix it from both ends! Seeing projects from multiple perspectives allows me to be more self-reliant What also keeps me on my toes is the break-neck speed of software development: blink twice and the libraries you know and love have evolved beyond recognition!

For example, I was away from Spark Streaming for 4 years, and coming back to it was nothing short of joyful, to see how old pain points were now resolved, and how the landscape has shifted to make developers’ lives easier. Tools, programming languages, the mindsets required, and the knowledge bases keep evolving, so the number of frontiers left to conquer is never diminished.