Congratulations, you made it a year!

I was reminded earlier in the week, that it’s been a year since the former Data Services director retired and it was fully my department to manage. At least some of the staff had their doubts I would last a year in the position, as it was a bit of a transition to the suburban office over looking the old city dump and smelling like sewage treatment plant after nearly two decades working downtown in a skyscraper with a whole new team, new working hours, new technologies and concepts to grasp and modernize. I don’t take well to change, I am very set in my ways.

I inherited an office where a lot was still done on paper, manually. Still too much, but it takes time to change institutions. The code base was old and complex, and a lot of things were not automated or scripted. It was a weird paradox – creaky but clever was so many things in the office. Things were often done, carefully, by hand through a web interface on a district-by-district by basis – rather then taking advantage of SQL, bash and R scripts that could work throughout the night processing complicated datasets rather then manually inputting them. It was a kind of a culture shock for all involved, though I think thing have gotten better and we are cranking out more data and developing new ways to target communications then ever before.

Truth is, despite the creaky nature of all things in that office, I enjoy the work immensely, as I get to work with Linux and R Code – and constantly have to think of clever solutions to fix bad data and process things efficiently. In many ways, I do wish I had become a professional programmer so I could do more problem solving on my own, but it’s good to have a lot of skills and be able to present clear ideas to be implemented to the programming staff – and know when wool is being pulled over my eyes about how the complexity of a solution. And be able to fix a lot of things myself with a few lines of scripting or SQL without going to the programming staff.