Science and Data

It is hard to say when I started to feel interested in coding skills. It’s been sort of natural to me, despite I have been focused to a completely different area with economics and stuff for quite a while. Now that “the era of data” has arrived, those skills have proven handy to me.

The background

Since we created “La Oreja Digital” back in 1999, I’ve always have had a foot set in DevOps teams’ door. My code skills have been built out of necessity, to understand what we were doing back at a time where Google was 3 years old, there was no other way. There were no cloud services, no Widgets, no Worpress, no nothing. Everthing was built from scratch out of our notepads. When comming to manage a webserver and to create any sort of interactivity with the outside world you needed serious OPS knowledge. In a small team like ours everybody needed to level up with the others: while developers needed to understand business management, “.com” minds needed to go down deep in to the code.

Just so you know, La Oreja Digital was probably the first serious online news portal for music and technology worlwide. Now all that is left is the registry of the company since we never took the time to close it up properly (link).

When quantitative analysis became my life

I wanted to do something meaningfull with my life. I wanted to contribute to knowledge and had a natural hability for teaching… the choice was quite obvious but obvious does not always come hand in hand with easy. It took a while to make it possible for me to devote myself to science and research. Now that I am on it… there is no other job I would rather do.

I am a R user and all its associated tools. I have invested quite a while in learning it and I use it comfortably. But still feel like a newy… everyday is a learning day for me.

Freelance consulting

Yes, I do that some times. It is always fun to go “back to the market” and engage in a project. I am not always available, though.

Recent open collaboration platforms like GitHub (although workflows are in place for more than 20 years, now) have provided a great opportunity to flexibilize collaborations and learning processess. This is the newest add-on to my skills, though. I am on the process of moving from “my desktop” analysis concept to a deployment-oriented workflow.

Let’s hit the road and see where it takes me.