48 hours of Advanced Technical Support

from Microsoft people who know what the hell they're doing.

I got to work with Microsoft Azure, HDInsight, Hive, Power Map, Microsoft Query against Hive Cluster.  Very cool weekend.  Unique learning experience and I made new friends. About 2/3 made it through.  

The data came from data.seattle.gov  and some of the presentations are very cool.  The suite of business tools was astounding.

I was also interviewed, along with my new friend and the only team mate who survived.  I was so glad she showed up this morning.  That wasn't a sure thing.

But even though I didn't present any of my "findings," and our presentation was, well, very much less than "strong," I was able to actually make it through the process from end to end, and replicate it.  That was what was most important for me - to learn.  So, my new friend and I went up there and gave a 3 minute presentation on our little PowerMap visualization (tres kewl product!), and then sat down.  No way was there any real insight into what we created, but jaizus!  some of the presentations really made it through a process.  They were awesome.

My First

HACKATHON!

I loaded my first Hadoop Cluster on MS Azure and wrote my first Hive query.  

This has been painful, but very, Very worthwhile.  The reason is because Microsoft has a team of experts in various products and this is really all about an intensive training session.  I started out with a group of four guys and one other woman.  About two hours into the "hackathon" proper (as opposed to the leading presentations) three of the guys were gone.  I think at least two of them were here for free food and had no experience with query language, Excel, Dashboard development, databases or their administration.  I'm not sure they could even write code.  The third guy was migrating from policy into coding and wasn't really familiar with query language, Excel, visualization concepts, or analytics, much less the other - basic - items.  

I *intend* to go tomorrow morning.  I left at 8:30pm, an hour before the Microsoft people *could* leave, although a lot of people were wanting to stay the night.  And when I say "a lot," I'd say that out of the original 300 which registered and showed (full room in the morning), there was less than 1/3 left when I left and some of the "kids" were planning on staying up all night.  Microsoft had planned to allow the all-nighter.  I had a conversation with one of the youngsters about, "Why do all the older people leave instead of staying all night?"  

Been there.

Done that.

The feckin' t-shirt has been worn to threads.  I want a bourbon.

But this was a good working experience, but shit, it's like starting up with SSIS & SSRS again.  My eyes are crossed and I feel like an idiot, but if / when I sit down to focus on this again, maybe - just maybe - I'll 'member some of this activity.   I just don't get why MS products are so "complicated" to figure out.  I had to load like twelve new softwares just to get the interface going, but gotta say...  I'm proud of the .csv file I loaded up.

Yep.  That's "Hadoop" - raw files, whatever format you want.  oh joy.  It's a big ole file folder and you specify the parsing routine in the select statement.  

But the thirty day trial versions / access...  I'm not gonna maintain that shit.  So, I guess I'll be dropping back by Hortonworks or somewhere else to spin up some clusters b/c Hive is Apache Hive and so the query language is unchanged.  I go open source b/c I am not gonna pay the corporate $$ but I do need to have access to the technology so I can add to the skillset.

Hate me

It's 77 outside and I'm sitting under my pergola in shade greened from the wisteria and grape climbing between the rafters.  I've been shopping at Pike Street Market all morning with a new friend.  She moved here from Chicago last year.  Yet another transplant who saw and fell in love with Seattle.  The first harvest of Rainier cherries and local strawberries is in.  I spent the morning walking her through some of my favorite stalls in the market, introducing her to the friends I have there as well as the foods I love.  When you're shopping in Pike Street, the vendors usually have samples for you to try before you buy.  The predate Costco by some 60 years in that marketing idea.

 We, Dave and I, are lucky to have this time, this summer vacation.  Even with as much running around as I'm doing, I can choose and now, at this moment, after I've returned from a day running around, and a night with intense technical lectures, and days where I've been working on building my portfolio, refining my resume, and continuing to work on my "Why I left Company XXX story, I've decided it's time to pop a chilled Portuguese rose, slice some cheddar, add some freshly harvested strawberries to the side of the plate and bring my PC outside to finish my correspondence.

And about that, there's always a first "demand" "to know" why "you left."  Suspicion is the first emotion I note from people in a hiring position.  Rarely is it ever curiosity, and then I've only seen curiosity when people are speaking just peer-to-peer.  Being unemployed is treated like a disease at first, but then the next emotion to pass over their demeanor is envy - especially as this is such a lovely spring in Seattle.  People sigh, and god forbid I mention I was out in the sun, at The Market, on Alki Beach, or wandering the woods of Lincoln Park.  One woman's lips zipped so tightly, I thought her seams would burst.  She couldn't have been more than 28, 29, or 30. 

Quite irresponsible of me, I know.  But I am about to return to working on my response email to an Amazon recruiter, giving them five times which would be good to call, I'll be looking up another contact from whom I received an email in LinkedIn. I'm sitting out here on my back patio and I'll work on emails from here.  Yes.  I deserve your envy.

Exploding Heads and Very Good Questions

I shoulda apply the "'What the Hell Are You Thinking' Mind-to-Mind" transfer ring to myself.  Some days I just don't get this "why" I need to push b/c the Meetup I went to today - 2nd lecture blew my brain up into

                 itty

      bitty
                           pieces

Ignoring the fact that I don't know shit about making my own query language structure (so what the hell was I thinking about attending a lecture on one.  I mean, fer chrissakes, I specialize in wearing multi-colored nail polish.

But the talk on google's new product launch, BigTable, very, very interesting.  Especially in light of yesterday's question which asked about that I/O blender effect.  In today's lecture Paul Newson, a Developer Advocate with Google, discussed this in terms of performance impacts because of "bully tenant" / "noisy neighbor" problems.  Anyways, google's rolling out their cloud solution and they've got a developer's kit for you to test performance.  But google's done some algorithmic changes at they've achieved at least three 9s of <well, shit, I forgot exactly what, but I remember thinking, *three 9s, they need five*.>    What the hell.  The free beer was after, so I was only drinking diet coke and it was hot in the room - or I was having hot flashes.  Anyways, they addressed the latency issue to the last 99% of their users... oh yeah... They're up to three 9s on the latency issue when compared to r/w actions of Hbase & Cassandra because of their algorithms and the way they've distributed the loads.  White papers to come at the bottom of this entry.

I was less interested in it from a database problem than I was for the idea of a cloud system which might be able to keep up with the Need For Speed for mobility processing.  But really, what do I know.  Not a fuck of a lot.  That's why I'm out here on Walk About.  But whatever... this was the first time I'd seen the questions of latency addressed.  They also addressed CPU, but as another attendee mentioned, they seemed to have left off addressing questions of R/W actions, bandwidth, etc.  Be that as it may, the distribution, the scaleability of the architecture seems reasonable with the idea of distributed processing, backups, replication, and redundancy.  And now this understanding of the Need for Speed.  Finally.  Something where Cloud Computing looks like it will keep up with mobility demands.  Not that I know anyfink.

So, yes, new metrics need to be added for "tenant" problems - which appears to be the street jargon for the I/O blender effect   However, the fixes appear to be the same budgeting idea that Docker  presented and which Zulily works with, apparently successfully in deploying their iterative application upgrades.

And this link is to a picture worth an extra $500 google credit to add to the $300 when you sign up for their cloud.  And I'd suggest it just so you can get a physical feel.

But there are a lot of smart people out there whose world is different than ours is/was.  I don't know shit, but then I never thought I did.  I just absorbed information.

Original 2006 BigTable WhitePaper
More Big Table Stuff

Relevancy and the Wireless Engineer

I was at a great Meetup last night where one of the speakers was Jeffery Heer of the UW.  His topic was data visualization.  Apparently the Stanford Data Visualization Group moved to Seattle and is now the UW Interactive Lab.  This talk reminded me of just how frustrating some of the problems I used to run into at work were because I couldn't find the right way to "see" the relationships.  Now that I'm out here in the wild I find that there are entire swathes of tools being created which help engineers explore the relationships in the oceans of data I swam in.  If I'd known about these guys then...

The mission of the Interactive Data Lab is to enhance people's ability to understand and communicate datathrough the design of new interactive systems for data visualization and analysis. We study the perceptual, cognitive and social factors affecting data analysis in order to improve the efficiency and scale at which expert analysts work, and to lower barriers for non-experts.

We work in near petabyte territory, if not petabyte, and we couldn't gain access to the tools which would keep us relevant in the industry.  Access to even Excel's PowerPivot would have been tremendously helpful.  As I've mentioned before, R or Python, would have made it easier to work through some of the datasets as well which exceeded the limitations of the Excel we did have.  

It's quite frustrating going to these meetups where they're looking for speakers and there is not one single engineer / "scientist" from any of the wireless carriers is ever there to give a speech.  Where are the wireless engineers to talk about the creation of performance KPIs in complex networks?  Data modeling?  Data wrangling?  The quality of the data?  How to manage missing data, alarm that data is not flowing?  How the acquisition of data affects node performance?  Managing monster sets of data?  What visualization tools are the most useful with heterogeneous network statistics so relationships can be found?   I've met recruiters from Century Link's Cloud Computing group, but that's not exactly a technical speech and they weren't engineers.

From what I've seen we've done a shitton more work with "big data" and predictive modeling and model analysis than most companies I see presenting here.  People are calling data "big" when It's just the first time they've had access to the data stream, much less to the historical data (i.e., retention periods have been extended) so that they can work on predictions, yet the engineers and statisticians from a myriad of small companies are giving the speeches.  Granted, these guys are real statisticians, PhDs., etc. but I'd like to see the theories applied to even more complex data sets.  Then there's the Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook speakers.  They have some interesting talks, but again, so far I haven't heard speeches about performance from them in high traffic situations, or when they're questioned about metrics they have available to guarantee service, the list is not long, or summarized.  They've got a minor fraction of what we were faced with in core engineering.  

We can, and have done better.  And while we don't willingly (any longer, but yes, I have) participate in making configuration & modeling changes on the fly to see the impacts, (i.e., live Ads would be an example) on our networks, we have to during FOA deployments.  Gah!  The hours and years I spent trying to get that data acquired prior to First Office and getting questioned as to its necessity.  IT'S TO BE ABLE TO DETECT FAILURES AT LAUNCH!!!  (ooo...  I just got all shouty-cap.  Deep breath.  Deep breath.)

Relevancy.  That's what is being lost by being siloed away from the dialogues going on in the outside world here.  Wireless engineers and scientists should be participating in these forums, especially if the companies are interested in software defined networks on cloud networks using virtual machines. Mobility is a demanding technology and I am not hearing a thing about it and I think that is quite odd.  When mobility hits "the cloud" space, especially if we don't own the cloud, it's gonna rain dollars and not in a good way - we'll be sending money out - again - without having the data to prove whether or not we're getting what we paid for.  Tracing network failures will be problematic and determining cause will be even more complicated.  

My non-scientific search of world-wide Meetups with the word "telecom" returned about 90 related meetups, 2 in Seattle (which I've promptly just joined). However, there are 90 meetups in Seattle for just analytics alone, not including things like "Big Data" or "Python", "Visualization," etc.  The corporations have cut travel budgets, they silo their engineers, they want to outsource as much as they can and there are no public forums for discussing technical details except things like vendor specific user groups.  They're actively creating a class of engineers who don't know much more than how to do data entry, or other repetitive work.  They're to make decisions based upon what they're told, not upon what the inquiry into the data returns.  

In the interest of capital efficiency, it all comes down to this:  if wireless engineering / "data scientist" / "network planning" (whatever the hell you want to call yourself) types do not have access, and do not participate in this larger world of "big data" discussions the corporations will not  get what they paid for, the networks will not be optimized, and worse - our (oh, I can't use that word any longer) customers will suffer.  Wireless engineers have fiscal responsibility for hundreds (yeah, I know it's more) of millions of dollars of equipment.  If we're not participating in this open-dialogue at this time, if we're not doing more with more data, then we're falling behind, becoming the irrelevant ones, and sure - anyone could do our job.

By the way, here's some more interesting information I came across from last night's talk:

imMens: Real-time Visual Querying of Big Data

And someone sent me this article with a question of "new metrics?" in regards to cloud computing and virtual machines.  Uhm.  Yep.  Just think about the complexity of trying to build a metric around The I/O Blender Effect.  I'd be all over "5 minute data is too high a granularity in measurement interval... I want 1!" and I'd lose.

crafting the perfect cover letter

Cover letters, it turns out, might be that foot in the door, the magic bullet, the all-in-one reveal everyone is looking for.  Cover letters, though, take time to craft.  If they don't, your submission is spam, you're spam, you're looking at the jobs like spam, and the return rate is gonna suck.

All that work for the polished up resume, meh.  Had to cut the summary section out.  I'm not gonna stress over trying to force that step-sister's foot into a combination resume format.  That effort will have to wait for the next phase of rejection and mostly because I've worked so many projects that trying to narrow it down... well, I've taken the bits which garnered me awards or commentary and added those to the cover letter.

I've also started adding some of my stripped out / schema deleted oracle sql code to a github repo.  This was wildly successful in yesterday's interview.  The 30 minute interview turned from testing me in my query skills to "are you sure you'd like to do this?" because I basically would be moving from a "Principal" engineer's position to one lower.  Apparently, "Principal" holds the same level in both Amazon and Microsoft as it does at AT&T.  Good to know.

Anyways, since I'd already checked out the payscale range for position at both payscale.com & Indeed.com.  I just noticed that information is no longer available on my LinkedIn account since I downgraded, but then they source their info from Payscale, so why bother.  My assumed rate of pay would be in line with what would be covered by the job description that I could find.  But really, it's all a "wait and see."  The interview also gave me some better phrases about how to explain my need for fun.  FUN = BUSINESS PROBLEM.  See, I can do business speak bingo.

Business problems are fun, if they're data related.  Either data acquisition, data cleaning, analysis, and reporting.  That phrase really, Really, REALLY worked for me.  I'm all plagarizing it all over the place now.  So, I scrubbed my newly reformatted cover letter and crew-cut resume off again so he could forward to recruiters.

Next up:  I'm putting together a list of questions which would be deal-breakers for me.  Email me your suggestions.

!! summer vacation !!

Woke up late after watching Vikings until 12:30.  Yes, I finally figured out how to use my television... for the first time in over a year.

Went to have coffee with a friend and work on my new cover letter focusing on gaming analytics. Drank cappuccino and had a croissant while signing up for my first aws account to begin learning what Amazon calls "Machine Learning," "Big Data Analytics Options on AWS," "Cloud Watch Metrics and Statistics (Elastic Load Balancing Developer Guide)."  If "we're" prepping for non-proprietary bare metal, "we" should be looking into the big boys and what they're trying to do.  I strongly suggest getting your reading in at both AWS & Microsoft's Azure.  Microsoft only has a two week trial of their cloud services through Azure, whereas Amazon has a feckin year.  Jeff Bazos is brilliant.  Brilliant.

I'm also trying to pick up the language of gaming analytics.  So far I've found some amazing blogs and white papers.  The language is similar to what we get from marketing, and the business side, but you know my focus will be on performance and load balancing.  But here are some links from "what I learned in school today" (while drinking cappuccino and eating croissant)

http://www.ninjametrics.com/blog/video-game-analytics-101-basic-definitions
https://developer.ninjametrics.com/Help/Glossary
http://blog.gameanalytics.com/blog/squeezing-more-juice-out-of-your-game-design.html


Walked the family to Camp Long and back.  The rhodies are in bloom along with the iris and so many other spring flowers.  I won't bore you with yet another set of garden pictures.

I've also been preparing for my first set of "real" interviews.  One of the most difficult things I've come to learn is that data sets, and data complexity large enough to keep me interested are not widespread yet.  Only a few companies have the capital, the interest, and the foresight to capture enough to keep me from boring myself to glassy-eye-edness. 

So, I am beginning to focus down and I'm out here in the sun drinking a glass of wine on a Thursday afternoon.

Life is good.  I think I'll go get laid while I'm at it.  Daaaaviiiiiddddd!!!

Job Search Steps for Fun and Pleasure

This walk-about I'm on is what I was hoping it would be.  I knew I'd gotten stale.  I could smell myself.  As I've said, "When 'new' isn't new anymore, it's time to leap off a cliff."  So I've been taking classes, attending conventions, getting out and being social and I as I learn, and talk with others about their work, I feel the beginning of clarity.

Unfortunately, I was then interrupted.  Now I'm sitting back down and I'm going to try to recreate some of the steps I've learned about job searching & career hopping.

First, if you're bored with your work trying to figure out what you want to "do" next will be neither fast, nor easy.  When you've worked in the same culture / same company / same industry / same field / same / same / same for as long as I have you're not going to understand the language of the new job descriptions, or the way your interests might apply to other industries.  This means someone's gonna have to "go social" on your ass.  Hopefully, it will be you, but if not, it might be good to have a friend who's an extrovert who will push you to get out the door and meet people.

As silly as it sounds, I'm targeting 500+ LinkedIn connections as a measure of how I'm pushing myself outside of my comfort zone.  I had something like 150 in August of last year - and that was from "organic" growing, i.e., passively waiting someone's request to me.  That took since 2008.  I just passed 400 this week.  The growth has happened in spurts,  with the first "new" 100 happening the three months I wound down at AT&T and the last 150 taking place mostly in the past 30 days that I've been getting out.

The cool thing about the LinkedIn connections is to find people who know people who can talk to you about a company.  Again, the point is We Do Not Know About The Outside World.  We've been immersed in the wireless industry for so long that the world has changed.

Now if you want to stay in your job, but begin the job hunt a bit more actively, here are my suggestions.  And they're only suggestions, they're not a magic bullet.  I know someone who got a new job in a different industry, but with the same background as she already had on her first try.  If you're not "hopping," everything is easier.  The fewer hops you take on (industry, job title, field, city, country, grade), the easier it will be in this economy.

1. Get a picture on your LinkedIn account which looks more professional.  Not necessarily boring blue suit, but one without the blank boy head outline, or the other with your kids.  
2. Begin working on the summary section of your LinkedIn account.  Turn off (you should see this on the right side of your screen) "Notify Your Network" of your profile changes.  You're going to be tweaking your verbiage all the time.  So, just do yourself and your friends a favor, turn off the notifications.
3. Set up email feeds with searches.  The best I've found are glassdoors & Indeed.  That said, don't apply to the jobs on those sites.  They're web scrapers and some of the links point to other webscrapers and you end up in this horrible, endless cycle of submitting your feckin' resume data and user names and making up new passwords and...  Just go to the actual company's site if you find something for which you want to apply.  
4. LinkedIn < > Resume and Resume < > Cover Letter.  And this is one of the hardest lessons I've learned.  You really have to know what it is you want to do, specifically, with that company and that specific job when you write your cover letter.  Creating the cover letter will initially take massive amounts of time.  Again, you're going to tweak, recycle, and continuously augment, but the cover letter is the primary focus you want to give to the recruiters.
5. Apparently, in HR World, being in recruitment is a "first step," "junior" position with many companies.  Your resume hits the slush pile of their desk.  If you haven't focused on key words they care about, your submission will be treated like spam.
   
    Which means
6. You will not be able to apply for as many jobs a day as you think you can.  And you shouldn't.  The return rate on those are crap.  Right now, they plainly state they will NOT contact you UNLESS they're interested.  I'm looking at "closed" jobs without contact as no interest in me.  My initial flurry of trying to submit to 3 jobs a day was foiled because of the submission process as well as the cover letter.
7. Job scrapers will pull in dead jobs.  So let me repeat.  Go to the company website to apply.
8. If you're interested in the company, but a product if you can, download a demo.  Play with it.  Get a sense of what they're trying to do and how the job description you're interested in fits into their plans.
9. There are job hierarchies.  You can use sites like payscale.com or glassdoor.com to figure out salary ranges, but getting an informational interview with someone within the company is even more helpful.  Make that one of your informational interview questions you ask.
10. Don't hesitate to ask someone if you could do an informational interview with them.

More later.  I'm pooped.

small companies might not "get" me

Back to the whole, "You need to get out & go to technical convention" thing I've been on.  Just got back from a one day event:  Advancing the Careers of Technical Women:  Seattle, held at Zulily's hq today.  Good event - yet again.  But most interestingly, there were women who knew women that I knew from other events.  Finally.  In all my years in tech, I haven't seen this kind of "circle" occur: where I went to introduce two people together who knew each other from other circumstances.

If you're not a woman you might not get the "hugeness" of this.  No.  Although I've spent half my life in tech, it's a rare event when I go to introduce a woman to another woman and they know each other.  I think today was my first day.  They also said, "Fuck it" with verve and freedom.  MY TIME HAS ARRIVED!

Conferences, Refreshments, and What I Learn at the Networking Events

Organizational Structures
www.bonkersworld.net

One of the things I've missed are conferences and networking events.  When travel & expense budgets began getting ruthlessly cut, they cut their engineers off from the information exhange, from learning how the rest of the world communicates, what else is going on in the world.

Some of you might have seen me post that I attended a two day conference, Codess, a conference initiated by Microsoft (prior to the infamous 2014 Satya Nadella comment about women not needing to ask for a raise) for women coders.  Now, I write code even if I don't have a CS degree and the panels covered - yes - MACHINE LEARNING (via Facebook & Microsoft Applied Scientists & engineers), Facebook's distributed processing architecture to handle large data queries and caching, It was fun, but being around technical tecchies was like sitting in on two days of testing.  But a couple of things did get clarified for me.  Like, about machine learning.  Seems people finally have enough data about user experiences and data about humans to do more testing than sample sizes of 300.  We, in telecom, have been working with it much longer, we just never really called our ENGBHCA "machine learning," but that's what the machine is doing.  No idea what algorithms might be getting applied, but in our world we work primarily with Regression Analysis and Correlation in order to predict exhaust or customer impact.

But we have a hard time talking to people who work in the field of advertising and marketing data.  That's where things get sticky for us.  Also, we've been working for quite a while now with structured databases (i.e., we're not just using 'grep' to search for strings in files, etc.).  Facebook's Engineering Manager, Lianxiao Zhu gave a great topological view of the hardware systems used to support Facebook's data needs.  And answered that, yes, FB keeps all the data.  They don't throw data out with the dishwater.  I think I drooled a bit.  She also introduced some data structures I wasn't familiar with like the Tao Data Model.

In their eagerness to save a buck or two so they can buy, instead of grow customers, our company forgets that engineers need learn in the wild.  We are not hothouse plants, and the company greenhouses are actually more like industrial superfarms where familiar ideas are replicated ad nauseum with micro-scruitny by faceless workers walking around in white suits.

To grow, their technical leads need to be challenged by other industries, other ideas, other innovative thinkers.  A good engineer shouldn't ask to be led to the next interesting break-through, but should be fighting for a good seat in a packed conference room to hear the next application of ideas they've worked with their entire careers.

I'm headed to another all day conference for women in tech, tomorrow, held at Zulily. It's also a job fair.  There will be food and drink provided.  My ticket cost $25.  Sunday, I have my own Code Sisters Seattle Meetup.  Tuesday there is a mentoring event for entrepreneurs led by the City of Seattle's Start Up liaison.  Tuesday is a webinar with RStudio on how to start with Shiny and Friday another talk through Seattle's Incubator system on hardware development for startups.

I should have clamored for time off to attend these events, but I didn't.  I forgot how necessary being around fresh ideas were / are to my own technical development.  I finally feel like I'm beginning to get a grasp on the new languages being spoken out here in the wilds.  But there was one horrifying incident yesterday.  

One of the attendees spoke up at the panel talk, "fireside chats."  Basically, there was an executive panel talking about what companies & universities are trying to do to encourage women to remain in tech.  The attendee spoke up was a woman about 10 years older than I am (cringe), who was really just very angry that coding is now considered de rigeur for being a statistician, and how the "data scientist" job is displacing the work done by classical statisticians.  There was a lot of frustration she held, but when I talked to her later she was not interested in the availability of classes to learn how to use statistical languages, how this new term, "data scientist" is merging into the world.  Lord knows, I continually asked for a statistician in my Christmas stocking, but they still would have had to be interested in learning how to code.  Still, it was embarrassing to be an older woman with obviously grey hair and be associated with static ideas and a "world shouldn't change," attitude.  

Anyways, get yourselves out there, folks.  The world is large and it is grand.  Remember why you loved learning in the first place.  I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, but I'm learning lots these days and it is

glorious.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming

Here are some of the garden pictures, including a baby hummingbird.  I don't have any regrets at this moment - 6 months after leaving.  What I can say is that this is gonna be the best SUMMER VACATION EVER!!!

Just for fun - write a game

So since I've been working with women who want to write their own games at Code Sisters Seattle,  I've become aware of the variety of open and available game "writing" software out there.  I've tried one or two MOOCs, but they start out to remedially for me, I get bored, and then drop out.

However, today during my first, formal Informational Interview, the person I was speaking with introduced me to GameDev.net.  I am exploring game studios / gaming, and performance data / other kinds of big-ish data sets.  Anyways, I ran across this little series of classes about the software needed (free) to build your own game.  I'd already downloaded them from one of the MOOCs I took, so, yeah, it's real.

creating a first person shooter game

Let me bring to your attention, some light summer reading

Just got the latest Dato Blog, "How to evaluate ML models, Part 3:  Validation and Offline Testing."  This made me add the link to my link collection there on the right.  This blog is well worth subscribing to just to get "caught up" on the language I was ranting about yesterday.

As most of "our" work is / has been done with static models, we've all smashed into that wall of trying to correct a bad model, analyze what's variant or driving variance, and what new factors are impacting load.  When capital is expended based upon a static model, trying to change that model runs into big-o buckaroos.  One of the really big deals I'm getting from my reading is the availability, and granularity of historical data.  Honestly, the more I read, the more historical data is what appears to my simple mind at this time as what makes "Machine Learning" possible.

This article points out that very specific "difference."  While it is discussing social data, performance data driving "Machine Learning" will drive a more fluid idea of a model.  And if models are fluid, how will costs be assigned?  What is acceptable variance?  Alot of interesting questions to think about.  Anyways, this is one of the least confusing threads I've found about machine learning and is well-worth reading just to update your language, guys.  Really.  No, don't go out there wearing plaid pants with a waist up to your arm pits.  No.  White socks and Birkenstocks are never a good idea.  Go shave your nose hair.  Really.

Kind of pissed now about the training we never got. Language lesson: Forecasting, Machine Learning, and Statistics.

Last night I had an interesting "moment" when one of the meetup organizers informed me that by using "machine learning" algorithms, he was able to successfully predict exhaust on his nodes and move traffic before there was customer impact.

uhm..  yeah, so?  Was my first thought.  My second thought was trying to decode what he meant by machine learning since traffic migration has been a part of my life since the beginning of time.  Was there now a newer, sexier term I should rewrite my freakin' resume YET AGAIN for?  I thought machine learning was trying to figure out how machines knew each other in the wild.  Nope.

And being out here in the wild, it just really got to me last night while drinking a pitcher (or three) with the boys (and one girl)... I was forced to take a shitton of useless training and after the late 90's, I couldn't "get out" to get the training at conferences, conventions, and other professional events which really mattered to idea sharing, and learning. </rant>

I've been asking around how people define machine learning (because I'm used to being an idiot) and I find that the term "Machine Learning" is flung around quite a bit.  There seems to be a lot of vaguery around exactly what it means, but everyone I've asked is very sure they understand the difference.  One person this past week told me the difference is that Machine Learning (ML) uses statistics (who doesn't) and results in probabilities, not final quantities.  The discussion here on StackExchange somewhat defies that notion, by hauling this little phrase out:

Simon Blomberg:

From R's fortunes package: To paraphrase provocatively, 'machine learning is statistics minus any checking of models and assumptions'. -- Brian D. Ripley (about the difference between machine learning and statistics) useR! 2004, Vienna (May 2004) :-) Season's Greetings!

When I saw the above, I 'bout bust a gut because bottom line, if you're buying hardware you're buying a model.  If you're sizing a network, that's all model based.  How do you know you're getting what you paid for?

Another thing which to me is "big whoop" (all lower case, notice, please) is that ML uses historical data.  Erm... okay.  whoop-de-fucking doo.  That begs the question of retention periods, granularity, and quantity / access to other data (variables) results.

Then they bring in the "data miners"

Add a third culture: data mining. Machine learners and data miners speak quite different languages. Usually, the machine learners don't even understand what is different in data mining. To them, it's just unsupervised learning; they ignore the data management aspects and apply the buzzword data mining to machine learning, too, adding further to the confusion. 

One person summarized the damned hoopla:

The biggest difference I see between the communities is that statistics emphasizes inference, whereas machine learning emphasized prediction. When you do statistics, you want to infer the process by which data you have was generated. When you do machine learning, you want to know how you can predict what future data will look like w.r.t. some variable.

uhm, sorta full circle and that means ML really looks like "forecasting" to me without marketing's involvement.  

Lord, I'm rolling my eyes now b/c I'm trying to figure out what the fuckin' differences are and why the hang-up on semantics and is the phrase, "forecasting" now?  Apparently not.  We are so outdated.

Also, don't follow me on twitter.  I can't figure out how to change the text of my tweets yet.  I feel like such a feckin' idiot.  

Staying up late and listening

To stories by David Sedaris

and not worrying about waking up at 6am

I've got a short story going
3 web browsers up with an average of 10.02 tabs open per browser
I'm running 3 Excel spreadsheets
I'm working on a Markdown file I'm loading onto Github
I've got yWriter5 open with Novel # (whateverthefuck, I never finish 'em)
My iPad is running a solitaire game
Planning a trip back to Catania, Sicily (a change from Portugal, but I LOVED SICILY)
Writing a "few" emails
Pinging a few people while looking up companies I'd be interested in information about (so sad you're a friend of mine.  Yer doomed, I tell ya, dooooomed!)

And here are some pictures from Sicily.  Why else do you fuckin' work?  Carpe the fuck out of your Diem.  Really.

Yes, the company will survive without you if you're gone for three fuckin' weeks.  Really?  It's the twelfth largest corporation in the world.  But even if it was the twelve-thousandth, why wouldn't it?

We work for reasons as well as we have reasons to work.

IT as either a cost center or a profit center

Last night at the Seattle Tech Mentors meetup, the organizer Brendan brought up a really, Really, REALLY interesting point about where the IT department fits in a company structure.  You want to find out if the work group, or the IT department, is part of a cost center, or a profit center.  If it's part of the cost center - the company is going to want to keep the costs as low as possible.  Flee!  hmmmm  didn't "our" group just get reorg'd to the IT dept?  Lemme guess which center that one falls under...

Another good piece of advice I got was about how to find out about the work/life balance of a company by asking the person during an informational interview:  "Where did you go on vacation this past year?  Or how much vacation have you taken this past year?"

Then, for where to check for salaries related - not LinkedIn.  Use payscale, Indeed, and Glassdoor instead.

Everything is turning into keyword searches.  The Indeed resume is not like any I've seen before.  I'm going to redoing mine - although I was contacted for two jobs through my name coming up in an Indeed search.

If you'll notice, the Indeed Resume is entirely skills based at a glance.  I'm working on my keyword searches because my name sure as hell doesn't show up anywhere, so I need to optimize that.  My LinkedIn profile has increased from the 50th position out of 100 returns to 28.  That puts me at page two.  I still haven't figured out what the search parameters are for my "profile" to turn up.  Gah!  So, LinkedIn sucks at capturing salary ranges and has a hidden keyword criteria.

Another piece of semi-irritating / bad news.  I've gotten conflicting information about leaving the LinkedIn status as still being an AT&T employee.  I just can't do that.  My brain cannot wrap itself around negotiating that big of a gap.  I know others don't have a problem, but I can't flex / respond to reality warps like that - at all.  ugh.  So, another nail in that coffin, but what-evah-da-fuck.

Informational Interviews - Why Can't We Be Friends?

I'm going to start a page with quotes and readings about Informational Interviews.  This is being consistently pressed upon me as the way to expand my network.  As someone who ignored LinkedIn until three months before I decided to take the Modified Rule of 75 retirement qualification, I can only say that three months was not enough time to build contacts, get my references in order, figure out my summary portion, escalate my LinkedIn "status," reword my unemployed state, or to begin educating myself about the outside world.

Each day there are so many jobs coming through my email I feel like hyperventilating.  I can't respond to "225 new jobs", or "417 data science jobs." I'm more interested in companies these days than jobs specifically and applying for jobs isn't getting me that information.  It wasn't until a new friend of mine impressed upon me the necessity of, and is currently arranging, an informational interview for me that I had my "pie in the face" moment.

Anyways, this page is to capture good quotes, good articles, and good questions for Informational Interviews only.  I'm not too worried about the job interviews b/c those are really just "sink or swim," you're gonna mesh or you ain't.

This article Michael J. Genevro has a lot of good points to jot down in your handy-dandy little notebook.  What I liked especially are the list of questions one could ask - until one has a freakin' clue of how these things might go.  I know I need those.  More importantly, is the "how," and this is where I'm kicking myself thinking, "Bah-duh!  of course!"  And this is where LinkedIn becomes useful and having your LinkedIn account at least up to some level of professional "look," even if it's not extensive.

That said, once you get your LinkedIn account looking decent, people do look at those to figure out if they do want to know you.  And while we in wireless only know each other, occasionally we might make a friend who knows a shitton of people.  I've now made a few of those friends.  So now, when I look at companies I see these social people I've met before who are linked with others in companies I'm interested in.  This is where you request your friend to set up an introduction.


From Genevro's article,

Conducting Informational Interviews

4 How Do I Set up an Informational Interview?

• Identify individuals to interview – use your existing network or current job research as a starting point.

• Contact the individual, explain your background and request a 15 to 30 minute informational interview.

• If the answer is no, thank the contact and ask if he or she would recommend someone else for an informational interview. Always try to expand your network.

• If the answer is yes, schedule the appointment – schedule the appointment for a specific amount of time and stick to that time allotment.

5 How Do I Conduct an Informational Interview?

• Prepare, prepare, prepare for the informational interview.

• Write down your questions. Prioritize your questions.

• Dress appropriately for the interview and be on time.

• Conduct the interview. If the interviewee extends the time of the interview, that’s fine, but plan on stopping on the interview at the end of the allotted time.

• Ask the interviewee for other possible individuals for you to interview.

• After the interview, send a thank you note within 24 hours.

• Debrief the interview – what did you learn?

• Move on to the next interview – always think “Next!!!” ...

Incubators, venturous people, broken high heels, and the value of paying for LinkedIn

While working on my social skills, I've run across people who are looking for startups they can fund.  Really.  9Mile Labs is one.  This is a firm which is looking to help mentor entrepreneurs and are doing a buy-in.  While I don't have my head wrapped around the whole start-up / app thing sufficiently to say more than, "Hello, I'm an idiot, but that's okay," and stumble around in my wedge heels, this whole start-up thing is getting taken very seriously here in Seattle.  The city and the state have liasons and funding for startups.  If someone has an idea they'd like to pursue, lemme know (not what it is, but your interest) and I can at least give you some places to check out resources.

Again, I'm running into people through meetups from Meetup site.  And my reading material has substantially changed.  I'm not reading about telco related stuff, but thinks like Geekwire or Business Insider trying to get a grip on these small companies.  Back to 9Mile Labs, they've got a process lined out here and they're taking applications for their next round of mentoring / funding.  They're using F6S to apply.  F6S seems to be a contact list of accelerators and incubators.  I'm also using it as a jumping off point to check out companies.

I met the Community Manager of 9 Mile Labs, Brandy Rhodes, who explained a little bit about what they do, how they work with people who have the ideas and for something like an 8% buy in, add some capitol the mix.  I'm most impressed with the mentoring and the training.  They work with 9 start ups at a time and run them through a 4 month "experience" is best I can describe it.  They've got a graduation day coming up.  If you wanna come play hooky with me, send me an email and I'll lead you to the dark side of a social life where you also have fun meeting people outside your normal day.

Another interesting person I met at two of the meetups is Brendan West who runs the Tech Career Mentoring meetup.  This guy is a high-end programmer who's got some great questions and what appears to me a great deal of experience with the meetup / job fair mash-up.  He asks the best questions and pointed me out the TUNE job fair I attended last week.  Yep, I could use some mentoring, but could also give some too.

If you're paying any attention to LinkedIn, you should check my profile out on a daily basis.  I'm changing verbiage all the time, I just don't notify my network.  I'm not all that certain paying for LinkedIn makes a hill of beans of difference.  I'm about to cancel my prime membership, but I have been able to see specific numbers - like how I rank for searches based upon my skillset.  I've moved from 50 out of 99 to 28.  So that is quite an improvement.  I have to have a "current" job even though it isn't one, otherwise my LinkedIn profile is degraded.  But really, who gives a shit.  I've gotten requests from Indeed, but not LinkedIn.  So, I'm not seeing value there in that arena.

However, LinkedIn does have much better information about the possible $$ around a job, who else would be applying, your rating for the job, and other basic pieces of info than Indeed or Glassdoors.  I don't know what I'll lose by lapsing the subscription, but once I figure out all the data flying at me, I'll check that out.  But ping me if my summary or other stuff makes you throw up in your mouth.  It won't hurt my feelings and might help my job prospects!

Still, I miss y'all bunches.
-a

I'm coming out

So, here I am, about to make possibly YET ANOTHER career-suicidal plunge, (Hey, December was all about looking a perfectly good career in the eye and then shooting it in the face.) but I'm excited.  And you know me, when I'm excited it takes the Packers defensive line to hold me down.

Hello, my name is Nettie Kestler and I write pornetry ™ ® © ¢ ¥ °.  No, really, I write what many would call, "filth," but I call explicit work, in whoretry ™ ® ©.  I'd insert a "ha ha" here, but it's been quite difficult to set up this separate identity.  I don't do "schism" very well, but I do see the necessity of having a writing persona separate from the engineering.  While my entire body of poetry is not sexually explicit, much of the more recent work is.  I blame it on my menopause.  I think that at 50, the hormonal changes seem to have melted my "cain't say that" filters to sludge. So, here I am, coming out because I did separate my erotic work from my standard work, but even my standard work I kept separate from searchability under my name.  I'm gonna be mooshing all the poetics under Nettie.  It's just easier.  One less blog to write 'n all that.

What brings this "coming out" about is that the Seattle Erotic Art Festival picked up five of my pieces and I took the three day ticket including the gala event and signed up to do the readings.  For poetry, it was a great pay day.  It was also my first "sex positive" event.  Yes, I was nervous, until I saw the art.

There were some striking pieces.  Most were high quality production, a few provocative.  One of my favorites was a short film of naked men running in slow mo.  Great ass shots.  The gala night was fun, but I still left by 10:15, I was in high heels (granted they were wedges, but still...) and tired.  The following nights, I hung out past midnight before the "Punkin Effect" took place.  No, Dave did not go with me and my friends abandoned me by 8 pm; they don't talk to strangers.  I do.  Still, there did come a time when the solitary nosy lady was not part of the scene and it was time to exit stage right, so I did.  This event was also taking place during the closing days of National Poetry Writing Month, NaPo for short.  I only got some three liners out those days.  It is mind-bogglingly difficult to be so overwhelmed by experience and to actually be able to put words to paper.

My favorite part was that I met some really sweet people and got some wonderful feedback on my pieces.  The most flattering was one of the invited photographers' appreciated the poem I wrote in response to his piece.  The guy has been around the block more than once and the poem seems to have resonated with him.  I'm getting a copy of the photograph which inspired the work.

I'm such a kid in the candy store these days, all wide-eyed and touching things I shouldn't.  Apparently people wear latex to be touched, so I did.  No, I didn't get nekkid when asked by a fellow writer.  She'd traveled all the way from Michigan to attend the event, but I'd promised Dave to behave myself.  Besides, I'm shy.  I might be curious, but not about getting nekkid in front of people.  I know zakly how I feel about that.  erm.  Not inspired.  Just tired.

The literary director, Briana Jacobs, was generous and patient with her cats.  There were four or five of us.  Anyways, the anthology is supposed to come out in June or something.  At least now that I'm "Out," I can post about that and just be excited.

My other blog, Nettlesting, is focused primarily on poetics - that is the straight craft of poetry.  I've marked it as adult though because I focus on erotic poetry at times.  I also use the "c" word.  You know I drop the f-bomb, but I'll bet you never believed I'd drop the "c" word.  But I do.  I'm wild that way, even if I don't get nekkid unless I'm at Olympus Women's Spa about to be scrubbed like a side o' beef laid out to cure.