New Year

Us at my company's holiday party

The New Year has happened, and I'm already back into the swing of things. The days off were nice, even if our travel was quite eventful (in the bad sort of way). I'm currently about four-and-a-half months into my tenure at my current job as a data analyst at Zynga. I really enjoy my job. It has its ups and downs, but all jobs do. I enjoy my work, the only issue might be that my team just needs another analyst, for which we are currently hiring. My coworkers are quite enjoyable. Even though we're distributed across the company on various teams, I enjoy the company of my fellow analysts at our regular meetings or when we meet for lunch.

Twenty-twelve was quite the eventful year for us. We got married, moved across the country, and I started a new job. All of these are big things on the "Most Stressful Events of Your Life" list, but it's worked out pretty well. We've had to downsize our living space in order to fit into the San Francisco Bay Area residential market, going from a small house to an apartment. Our apartment is nice and so is the complex, but it's definitely just a temporary arrangement.

Being married has been interesting. It hasn't changed who we are or how we interact in any major way, but it's this slight thing that's always there. The plain band on my finger is always there to remind me that there is this amazing woman who loves me, even when I make mistakes. She's wonderful and sometimes I wonder why she puts up with my dumb butt.

This blog has stood neglected due to my lack of time. To be honest much of my blogging I would do at work at my last job because I had the spare time, which I don't now. This just means that I'm not so bored at work any more, which is a good thing.

I take the BART to and from work each day, with roughly one hour and fifteen minutes of total commute each way. I usually spend my time on the train playing a game on my Vita. My current obsession has been Patapon. I used to walk to and from the BART stations but it's been colder so that's fallen a bit to the wayside and I've been taking the shuttle from the station to work. The temperatures here don't vary as much as they did in Arkansas, especially in San Francisco. There's very little temperature variance there. The ocean and the Bay have quite a stabilizing effect.

Life is good. I like where I am and the direction I'm heading. My work is great, I'm learning so many useful skills and people really seem to value my opinions (which is always nice). I'm positive about the future. I think 2013 is going to be a good year.

My Journey: Becoming who I want to be

I really hope you listen to the music in this post.

As anyone who follows me on twitter is well aware, I've been applying to jobs recently. This is due to the fact that, come August 10, my job won't exist anymore as my company did not win our bid for the government contract that we currently work. I've waited until recently to do this because I wanted to get my degree wrapped up and I wanted to wait until we were closer to that last day. I wanted to wait until that last day because I don't want to leave my company high and dry without me, at least not for too long.

You see, the word "Senior" is part of my job title, and it's not because there are a bunch of "Normal' or "Junior" of my position who work below me. It's because I'm the only person with my job title. If I left there would literally be nobody to do the things that I do. There used to be at least three people who did the work that I currently do. My company also used to do Medicare work for more states, so I believe that the job necessitated that many people. However, the number of states that we work went down, and 2 of the people in my position moved on to another company in our umbrella that does private insurance. Then, the last person decided to move on as well.

When I was hired I was to replace the only person still working this job. I also only had three weeks to get up to speed. Fun fact: I had never worked with databases, SQL, or MS Access a day in my life before my first day here. Those three weeks were pretty brutal. A bunch of medical terminology was flying past my head and my predecessor/trainer tried to make sure I was acquainted with all the regular reports and analyses that I would have to perform. We did a pretty good job of it, but I was definitely not fully prepared once I was handed the reins. There was still much that I would have to teach myself, and I did.

Just a couple months into working here I was already a far more capable SQL (specifically SAS/SQL) programmer than any of my predecessors. I know this because I've had to work with all the code that they left behind. Since that's the primary method by which I do my work, that's pretty important. In December a recurring data request came up. I called one of the predecessors to find out where the code that they used to do it was and when I ran it...well, it ran for five hours and then crashed. The error produced seemed to indicate that the database server had run out of memory with which to process the request, a terrible sign indeed (since databases servers are designed to work with massive amounts of data).

So I dug into the code. The code was creating several different (temporary) tables and then writing them each to files at the end. (I would then write those files to a CD and send it off) I changed the code so that it would create one table, write it to a file, and then drop the table to free up the memory for the rest. Instead of getting all the data together and then writing it to files, I'd do it one at a time. Run again, still crash.

This time I decided to really look at the code of each query to see what it was doing. The program begins by importing some tables that will be used in the processing of all the data. Then it loads data from our tables and joins the information together. The tables that were imported at the beginning had claim information, and they were being joined with our data not on the claim number, as is typical, but on the procedure code. The problem is that procedure codes are by no means unique for each record, so this was creating a tremendous amount of duplicate information. Then the code would use the GROUP statement (by grouping on all the variables) to remove duplicates instead of the DISTINCT modifier, as one should.

I had to rewrite all these queries so that they weren't horrible. I started by writing a new query to figure out what all the procedure codes in the loaded tables were and then added a condition to the original queries that states "Only pull claims that have one of these procedure codes". Then I got rid of the imported tables completely; they weren't necessary anymore. Then I touched some things up, removed the check for duplicates since it was no longer needed, fixed syntax problems, and then I ran it. Instead of the 5 hour failure that it was before, it was a 5 minute success.

That's just one story. I'll spare you the story of the code that I literally had to print out and mark up with a pen so that I could figure out what it did and then rewrote to be at 20%-25% of its original length.

I guess this is all really about my resume, which is really weird. I just received my Masters, which took me 4 years to get, but I've been working for a year already, in a "Senior" position? It seems like all of that would raise a ton of red flags for someone looking at my resume, not to mention the two typos that I keep beating myself up over. I hate all of this because I know--I KNOW--that even though I have skill gaps and only have one year of job experience I could pick up the skills that I need very quickly on the job, and that once I had I'd be an incredibly valuable employee. This is something that I would love to be able to communicate in my cover letter but doing so would require acknowledging and pointing out a weakness that I have, which seems like a bad idea.

Over the past week I've applied at tons of places. I currently have 25 outstanding applications (those which I don't know the status of) at many different companies. Some of them I'm definitely qualified for. Some of them are a bit of stretch. I really hope that I hear back from some of these. I'm ready to move on to a more stable position in my life. Earlier, I felt stable but I still didn't have my degree, which was keeping me from feeling at peace with myself. There was still so much guilt wrapped up in that. Then I learn that I'm losing my job but now I have my degree. Fortunately, people don't really tend to lose degrees so once I get a stable job I'll feel secure.


I'm tired of being lazy and making the easy/only remaining choice. I'm done with that. So much of my life has been dictated by that. A couple months ago I was notified of a position at our parent company that my skill set applied to and I probably could have gotten easily. But I'm just not interested in working in medical insurance anymore. I could have taken it, but I decided to go the hard way and that I would try to get a position at a company that I truly wanted to work at.When we play games, we're usually playing a hero. Heroes aren't the people who make the easy decision. Heroes aren't lazy. Heroes don't wait until the last minute. Damn it, I want to be a hero. I don't necessarily want to be a hero to the world or even to a large number of people, but I want to be able to see myself as a hero. I want to be one to the children that I one day hope to have. I want to be able to look at myself and my actions and be proud. It's time for me to become the person that I want to be.

I'm going to keep applying to jobs until I get one. I'm going to keep improving on my resumes and cover letters. I'm going to start looking into filling those skill gaps that I have. I'm going to do every thing that I can to get the best damn job that I can. This way I can't look at myself and beat myself up for not trying hard enough.

I've added a new link to the top of my page. It goes to an anonymized version of my resume. I encourage you to take a look at it. If there's somewhere you think I should apply--even where you work--I am enthusiastically accepting all recommendations. My email is on it if you want to email me. You can also pass it along if you want.

Friends, if there's something that you want to accomplish, I heartily encourage that you go for it. There is not one of you that I don't wholeheartedly believe in. You may not think much of yourself, but I do. Each and every one of you has skills for which I envy you. Go for it. Why not? You deserve only the best.

An Update on Me

I talked on twitter a while back about a presentation that I had to do that you may have been able to surmise involved World of Warcraft. However, I didn't say what it was for. It was for my Masters program. I needed to do that presentation to graduate. The real truth is that it's taken me forever to do it. For comparison, the last class I took for my degree program ended in December 2010 and for the past year and a half I have been fighting myself to do that presentation.

It all started with my biggest flaw, sloth. I didn't work on the presentation because I was worried about the cumulative exams that I have to take and whether I'd pass those. I figured I would work on it after I got past that hurdle. I got past that hurdle and there wasn't enough time left in the semester to finish the project and present it. So I planned on doing it at the beginning of the next semester.

Well, I didn't work on it because, "Hey, I have plenty of time, at worst I can just present it later in the semester." Laziness compounded on laziness and I didn't get it done by the end of the semester. This turned into me being afraid to contact my professors. What if they would judge me for my tardiness? What if they told me it's too late? Then guilt set in. I was letting down so many people by not having done this already. I couldn't even think about it without feeling bad about it, so I would avoid thinking about it, and therefore would avoid working on it.

Laziness, forgetfulness, and avoidance due to guilt built on top of each other, turning a 2 year degree into a 4 year degree.

I'm glad I don't have this kind of work ethic when I'm at a job. It somehow just seems to apply to my personal life

Finally I kicked myself in the butt and it's done. There was some judgement from my professors about the delay, but not much and everything went fine, and now I feel so much better. It damn-near literally feels like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. The question now is: "What now?"

I still have to look for a job (due to my impending unemployment), that hasn't changed. I don't feel like I'm done learning. I don't have any immediate desire to pursue a doctorate, that's for sure, but there are still things that I would like to learn. To begin, I didn't know that there are SAS (statistical software) certifications. I wasn't surprised that they exists, I just didn't know. So I'm going to be pursuing some of those.

I'd also like to get a deeper understanding of R. Right now I've been taking a "try and find solutions on the internet to your immediate goals" and I'd like to take a more structured approach. Maybe I'll buy a book, because right now I basically just now data manipulation and basic operations. I don't know how to do actual statistics with it.

I think I'll look through MIT's OpenCourseWare for mathematics/statistics courses that I could self-teach. I'm also interested in various computer science courses that relate to internet programming. I'm not interested in server stuff, but I am interested in webpage programming (in case you can't tell from previous blog posts).

Now that I'm free from the pursuit of degrees, I think I could actually enjoy taking courses. Perhaps I could take some computer science courses and fill out knowledge there that I don't have. I could make a serious effort at learning a foreign language. That is, once I find out where I'm going to be living/how employed am I going to be.

I wrote most of this about a month or even more ago. Yesterday (6/6/2012) I actually received confirmation from the office of records that I would be graduating. The request for graduation had been "pending" for so long and I was worried that it would fail to go through because of some clerical error. I'm very relieved to have this confirmation. I've been applying for jobs but I need to apply for more. I only have two months left here. There's one job application that I'm particularly excited for, but I won't say what it is (at least, not in such a public space). 

There is something that I've also been thinking about lately, which is tattoos. I've kinda been wanting one for a while. I even created a Google Docs spreadsheet of ideas. I think I may have settled on what I would get, if I ever get up the nerve to do so. I would get a lowercase tau. I've been using it long enough as part of an identity that I've really grown quite fond of it and attached to it.

I'm officially have my Master's now, and I feel pretty good about that.

First Day on the Job

I was 3/4 of the way to work and I realized that I forgot my badge. So I turned around and started driving home, calling Sarah on my phone to try and get her to find my badge and get it to me. At first my thought was, "Ok, if she picks up she can just bring it to me in the parking lot since I left super early for work and she'd be able to get there in time." Then it became, "Ok, she can meet me at the gas station just off the interstate." Then it was, "Ok, she can have it for me at the door." Twenty times I called her and she never picked it up because it was in another room, the ringtone is quiet and she was asleep.

I got home and was freaking out. I got my badge and started driving back to work. I called work to let my boss know that I'd be 10-15 minutes late. She explained that it was ok and that on her first day she got in a wreck. After that call, I called Sarah and apologized for freaking out in her direction. I got to work, was shown around (there's a ping pong table!) and settled in to begin orientation/training.

None of my passwords or permissions were set up yet. So I began training with the senior statistician. There's SO much to learn. There are so many acronyms to learn that I made a vocabulary list. My group went to lunch at Larry's Pizza. Even by the end of the day my stuff wasn't set up, so I did some reading on paper that I could do. Then at five o'clock I went home. I changed clothes and went to go tutor.

It was a pretty long day.