It's been ages since I last wrote a post in this blog and actually I never really looked for it to be popular or having loads of readers. I guess I started writing online just to something different from working on my PhD, which I finished two years ago (and you may read the thesis here), and to have a place where I may rant about things I like or I dislike... whatevs.
Well, now I inscribed myself to a new course on internet stuff... to be more specific, I am now taking an online course to get an MSc in Computer Sciences and Telecommunications. I don't really know how it is going to work because it's been only two weeks since it started but they assigned me two write two blog posts.
Well, I have decided to write just one addressing the two issues #rebel.
First, arguing about working on the cloud. This is clearly the way to go. I always like making fun of my girlfriend whenever she physically go to the bank to pay something. I think not working on the cloud is the equivalent of physically going to the bank, it's ok if you're living in the 90's but not anymore. Let me tell how it worked when I graduated from uni in 2005 (12 years ago!): I went to work, coded a long VBA script to run some actuarial simulations, waited for three hours while they were running and then... CRASH! Lights went off and all my work lost. This happened on several occasions.
This has not happened again to me since I started working on my PhD thesis. I realised, that compiling $\LaTeX$ saved my files automatically and that having it in Dropbox helped two purposes: Not only I could send the link to my supervisors and they would be able to read it on the spot, immediately after I had written it, and modify it if necessary. But also, I didn't have to worry if for some reason I lost my laptop or it was stolen or whatever, I could go to any other computer and my information was intact. The important stuff was safe.
I have a friend whose laptop was stolen from a train in Italy while she was on vacation just before coming back to hand in her thesis. She had no backup and was not working on the cloud. Result: she had to stay one more year to replicate anything. That is a problem of the past now.
I am now the Analytics director at a market research industry and I basically have two main tasks: run the models we create, which need a lot of data as input and take a lot of time to run. Hence I need some serious computer power to work and that makes my laptop a very heavy machine. THe other task is to go with clients and explain to them the insights we found from those models. Carrying my computer was a literal pain in the back, so I decided to buy this tablet/laptop which is very light, and I may carry it around and show the power point presentations I did in the other computer with no problem. Since in the office we use OneDrive from Microsoft, everything I do everywhere it's always there, as if had been always there.
One more thing on cloud-based working, if you're coding, use GitHub. Controlling different versions of a script and collaboration is very easy with these new technologies.
I think that the main message I want to convey is the following: go cloud now and welcome yourself to the year 2017. Otherwise, you're doing it wrong.
The second issue is about Wikis, but seriously... who doesn't use Wikipedia nowadays for everything?
In case you don't know already, the collaborative tool to know stuff about coding is Stack Overflow, give it a go.
