A Personal and Professional Introduction

I've been delaying this for a while, but it's time to start my blogging journey! I've always loved teaching and sharing my passions with others and have wanted to share the many fascinating things I learn every day. However, I rarely take the time to share these learnings. I hope this format will help me spread my ideas and hopefully teach a few people something new!

While my current job is as a data analyst, it's just a small part of who I am and what I do. From a young age, I had a strong affinity for math, being very analytical and detail-oriented. This mindset has influenced all my hobbies in unexpected ways.

In high school, I was inspired by an oscilloscope that my science teacher showed us. This device could display a 2D image of a wave in response to sound. A sine wave, which sounds smooth and pure, produced a smooth curve. A triangle wave sounded more tonal, not too smooth or too harsh, and a square wave created a boxy, gritty sound that seemed to fill the room. I believe this sparked my early interest in music production. I started making electronic music on my computer, fascinated by how I could create different sounds using combinations of waveforms, filters, noise, and distortion. Fast forward about eight years, and I've produced countless drum and bass tracks, released some of my music on underground drum and bass labels, and shared it on streaming platforms under the name Coxy. Insert shameless SoundCloud plug. I've also enjoyed DJing at many house parties, clubs, and recording sets, discovering a talent for it (all you need to do is count to four).

When I went to university, I chose subjects that truly interested me: Mathematics and Statistics. I think the main reason I did well in these courses was my inability to focus on anything else until I solved the problem I was working on. Sometimes this feels like a curse, but the satisfaction of finishing a problem or project and knowing I did a good job has always been a key motivator for me. Through statistics, I became fascinated with probability theory and how we can assign numerical values to likelihoods to make true statements about random processes—essentially taking the randomness out of random. I also discovered a love for data visualization by learning to code with R, performing various analyses like regressions, clustering, and gradient boosting.

Although I felt highly skilled and knowledgeable, I didn't choose the most career-specific degree. If you study marketing, you work in marketing; if you study to be a doctor, you become a doctor. But if you study math, the most obvious paths are to continue in academia or become a math teacher. However, in my career since then, I've found that the strong problem-solving skills I developed have been invaluable, along with the ability to round numbers correctly.

After a long and challenging job search in a crowded market, I finally secured an internship with my local city council's Data & Analytics team. I was truly inspired! On my first day, I was introduced to Microsoft Power BI, a tool for creating interactive dashboards using datasets and queries to gain valuable business insights. The interactivity amazed me. In my university studies, all my data analysis had been painstakingly coded in R, where I had to carefully position each axis and define color codes, only to end up with a basic scatter plot that looked like it belonged in a science journal. This marked the beginning of my professional journey, where I brought my strong passion for problem-solving to quickly learn the fundamentals of data mining, visualization, analysis, modeling, data warehousing, and more! I've discovered that there is always a complex problem to solve and a creative way to do it!

Even though I have only 2 years of experience in this industry, I have gained many valuable technical skills that I enjoy sharing with others. I've also developed soft skills from leading projects with many competing stakeholders, and I've learned hard lessons, like the pitfalls of overpromising and under-delivering. I hope to find the time to pause and share the lessons I've learned, the projects I'm working on, and some unrelated topics along the way.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to share something again soon!

Carter