This is excellent advice.
I have done side hustles for a while before jumping full indie, when I had enough runway to make me comfortable.
Some people wait to jump full time once their side income replace their salary. For me, it's a recipe to procrastinate forever
Why? I don't use (Neo)Vim the editor specifically for anything except code, but I do use Vim bindings pretty much everywhere where I have to write text, because it's much more convenient. If I wanted to write an email and my email client didn't support vim keys, it would make sense to just write the email in vim and copy it to the mail client.
In April this year, I left my job. It's been 8 months that I work as a freelancer (Data Science) and my experience might be interesting for people in this sub.
It was a good job, as a Senior Data Scientist, in a US company, working from Italy. I was paid well above the Italian average. I had stocks and bonuses, private medical insurance and various benefits I never used. Overall, I made more than €100k in 2022, and I was on course to make even more in 2023. I left it anyway. I feel like time is passing, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could be useful outside employment too. I also realized that I don’t have the energy to grow a side business and have a full-time job at the same time. Some people do, but I am not one of them.
Without a job and a salary, I started looking for freelancing opportunities. I already had some contacts from last year and started with an Italian client. Not much work, but it was a start. I kept applying to more jobs on Upwork, reshaped my LinkedIn profile and also paid for the Small Bets membership, to increase my chances to get some job opportunities and learn about building an online business.
In May, I got in touch with an Italian online school for Data Analysts and started to teach there until mid-July. It was a part-time gig, as I was only doing it for 3 days a week, 2 hours each. I worked a lot to prepare the lessons, much more than the hours I was paid for. In the end, this gig took a lot of my time (at least 2 full days a week) and paid less than €800 per month. Helping people to change their career trajectory was very rewarding, but financially it was a disaster. I will not do it again. Are all teachers paid this little? No wonder there are so many bad teachers around.
In July a friend of mine suggested me another gig with an Italian start-up. I started to work with them on some Data Analytics stuff. The rate is not amazing but the job and the team are great. I am still working with them. In August another opportunity came up, through the Small Bets community. More Data Science related, with another great team, a fair rate and a long-term commitment. In the meantime, I was also getting some more gigs on Upwork and was able to increase my rate and get more reviews there.
Over the last 8 months, I was in more than 50 between conversations and job proposals on Upwork. At the end of the day, only 6 of them turned into job offers. That makes it a 12% conversion rate, which doesn’t look that bad. Most of the rejections come from Upwork anyway, a tough platform.
I am satisfied with my freelance journey, but I think it should not take more than 50% of my time. Ideally, keeping at 2-3 days a week should leave me the time to pursue what I really want to do. Build an online business.
I have published more details about it in an article in my blog.
I often write about my freelance experience in Data Science on Twitt...X.
I am collecting almost every day all the best DS/DE/DA internships I find out there on LinkedIn.
I think an internship is a great place to start learning as a Data professional and many are starting right now.
Also, it's Summer and many of those ads have a low competition (everyone is on holiday). Today I saw a job post looking for a Data Engineer with only 1 applicant.
1) Break something on purpose. 2) Make sure the business notice it (usually a spectacular cost increase does the job).
3) Come in and fix the issue
4) Make a cost comparison quick chart before/after
5) Become famous
If you look long enough in most code bases, you will eventually find a spectacular problem.
Case in point, I was working for several months for a client, and I had a slow afternoon, so I decided to convert some calculation to numpy, see if we gained any free perf.
We got a x100 local speed up, which was very fishy. Gaining speed is common with vectorization, but two orders of magnitude is a lot.
So I looked at the original algo. There was a glaring mistake in it, that I fixed by my numpy code without noticing, and just changing that in the pure Python algo, without using numpy at all, made it X50 faster.
I could then call my client, and celebrate the good news. Not "there was a mistake", no. But "we found margin for progress".
The best quotes from immortal Stoic Philosophers. Read Quotes on Life, Love, Happiness, Strength, Purpose and Death. Learn daily from the Stoics how to give meaning to your life and live long.
I remember I wanted to read Principia in my first year as a Physics student.
Never got my hands on it but got my hands on other old physics books and I think it a bad idea to study on those.
The new ideas are usually not presented in the clearest way. They often are shown from the point of view of the author, who is a genius and has his own way of seeing things.
Better to study from people that have digested them, discussed them with peers and have a point of view on things that has become the standard in the scientific community
I have written this short book to summarize my experience with applying analytics to soccer matches outcomes.
It shows you how to install the basic software, obtain historical data about matches, visualize data, build a model and test it.
After reading it you will be able to use data to create predictions about the outcome of soccer matches according to a statistical model.
You will be able to apply this knowledge straight away as a betting strategy.
This book aligns with my mission with Alfa Data (https://alfadata.xyz). Bringing data driven strategies into the football betting market, at all levels.
With Trendyt we want to give everyone access to the best content of reddit and automatically analyze the posts they are interested in.
Our tool will save you a lot of time. Instead of scrolling through an endless stream of threads and comments just check our dashboard. We will automatically discover new trends, analyse all comments and uncover the sentiment on the most interesting topics.
We are launching a Demo today, including only 6 subreddits, to demonstrate the potential of the product and gather some interest.
Once we launch the product you will be able to choose which subreddits to follow and get all stats and insights updated daily.
Hope to get some feedback from the community!
Thanks!
