Other posts I’ve written

Here are a few links to content I’ve written and published elsewhere. Maybe someday I’ll self host these posts so that they aren’t at risk of disappearing? But maybe they are happy where they are.

Guidance for anyone looking to become a junior data scientist

I’m sure there are plenty of opinions that could be tossed at this post. “You really have a title with junior in it? Horrible” or “these expectations are completely out of line with other companies” etc. That is all fair. The junior title makes it easier to give talented people a chance to get their foot in the door because, yeah, there are some very specific expectations for data scientists on my team. That said, I’m not opposed to having my mind changed by some good faith discussion. Try tossing me a DM and lets chat if you are actually open to discuss and not just rant about it.

Guidance for current Data Scientists looking to get promoted to Senior Data Scientist

Not sure if this one is more or less controversial?

User Defined Aggregate Functions In Spark Dataframes

The first technical blog post I wrote related to Spark. Turns out the Spark community mostly has moved away from UDAFs in favor of tryin to keep everything done with built in functions (since then the optimizer can reason about those operations where a UDAF is a black box to the optimizer). But it is still a fun post if that is the type of thing you like.

How to Solve Non-Serializable Errors When Instantiating Objects In Spark UDFs

The second technical blog post I wrote for PIQ was WAY more successful. Embarrassingly so. At one point it was the top visited post of any content on the PIQ blog. I’ve had multiple people tell me they were googling error messages and read half of this post, thought " this sounds like something Paul would like, I should send it to him" then read the byline and realized I wrote it. I even reference my own blog post more often than I’d like to admit. Also this was written in 2017 and it is wild how dated some of the comments are (PIG! Scalding!) and also wild how relevant some of the solutions still are.

Interviews

JP Valentine interviewed me for Episode 31 of AI Mentors. We talked about about Data Science and why I recommend avoiding Machine Learning until you don’t have any other choice.