Second day of fellowship!

We spent most of the day installing Spark, Kafka, and Zookeeper. Peppered throughout were some talks or time to ask the director questions about our project(s).

Today I started writing install shell scripts while reading the guides to start automating the downloading and unpacking tar files process. Since you can run bash scripts from a URL with the command bash <(curl -s http://link/to/file/script.sh), I saved files to my github in the repo http://github.com/katychuang/insight-sandbox

Pretty Shells

With all this command-line work the past few days, of course I decorated the screen to make it easier to read and a more pleasant color scheme. Ubuntu 14.04 by itself comes with the default black and white textual view. It’s fine for those who like the monastic style but myself I prefer more color. To get the colors and formatting, I installed zsh (specifically oh-my-zsh) outfitted with the pygmalion theme, which comes from the oh-my-zsh download. Split screens and multi panes/windows come in handy for being connected to multiple servers, or having multiple apps running on the same connection. To handle these sessions, I use tmux, which is easy to install with apt-get install tmux. When editing config files, I like to have syntax highlighting to help with navigating comments from configurations; variables from values. I installed vim plugins with the vundle package manager, some of which include: gitgutter, vim-indent-guides, airline, limelight, goyo.vim.

I saved examples of my configuration files in my dotfiles repo http://github.com/katychuang/dotfiles

Locally on my laptop I’m still using emacs most of the time, and iTerm2 for ssh connections. It’s possible to connect with servers with emacs but I haven’t learned how to do so yet. iTerm has a nice feature that lets you broadcast keyboard commands to all the panes, that was helpful for speeding up some of the steps.

~*~

Alumni panel

In the afternoon, we were visited by few fellows Josh Ainsley, Katie Yoshida, Noga Neeman, who gave us advice about a wide number of topics:

• Get lots of feedback from your project - fail fast
• Don’t get too attached to any idea
• Have something to show - iterate by bits
• Career advice
  • Weeks to months in length
  • Location based recommendations
  • ask companies what the work and environment will be like day to day
  • do you want to be 1st data person there or 30th? Somewhere in between?
  • Ask about cultural fit, work environment
  • Are there learning opportunities?
  • Do you like the team?
  • Consulting roles may have more customer facing involved

Alumni giving us advice, calming our fears? #insightfellows "Know everything and you'll be fine" #day3 #datascience #dataengineering #phds

A photo posted by Katy Chuang, PhD (@katychuang.nyc) on Sep 10, 2015 at 2:52pm PDT