I’m going to start blogging, and today is the day.
I’ve been having a lot of fun getting back to productive procrastination. In my first job at the company basically blocked the whole internet while you were at work. So if I got bored at work, I did what any normal person would do and that’s play around with programming languages.
I came into a job at a mutual fund company with a music degree, having said that I (heavy finger quotes) “knew how to program in R” because I’d used it once in an intro statistics class. I rarely even showed up to lecture in that class, but I also needed a job, so there you go. They were looking for people to do workplace automation stuff, and to be honest I’m not sure the job was all that competitive to get.
Once I got the job, I actually learned to program because otherwise the work was just stupidly boring; manually constructing spreadsheets so that they could be printed out into nice PDFs for the purposes of accurate reporting of mutual fund performance. At this point in time, this was my day job until my band could really get going, so I was less than enthused by the work.
So, much of the time, instead of doing what I was assigned I threw myself into programming. Because we weren’t allowed to use a normal programming language (Python and C++ were the remit of the “IT Department” and thus illegal for normal “Business Users” to use) I learned (and loved) R.
(Sidenote: R is SUCH a strange programming language. Where else do you have non-standard evaluation as a totally normal thing to do?)
In any case, I feel that I’m getting back to that workflow. When I’m getting frustrated with research, or I have something running, instead of checking my bluesky feed or playing a game on lichess I’ve started automating with bash and finally learning how make works. I’m hoping taking some time to write most days will serve a similar purpose, a chance to organize my thoughts, put them out into the world, and share what I’m working on a bit as I go.