Or more informatively:
“Gee, Briana, where have you been?”
I’m gonna reduce the cheeky “I bet you’ve been wondering where I went” down to that subtitle and this sentence. Instead lets’s get down to what I’ve been up to!
SQL & Scripting
Yes you read that right. I’ve gone and learned SQL.
It’s worse than that, I am actually full time supporting a team that is modeling data moving it from SAP and several other sources into Teradata.
“Why?” Some of you may ask.
“Have you lost all your creative soul?” Others may cry.
Piffle to that!
Yes, a lot of what I do now is spreadsheets, and quite dull. But all jobs have dull parts. And yes, SAP sometime makes me want to stab myself in the eye. But there are good days. For example: there is something really rewarding about going in and writing some scripts that pull metadata from a system that my teammates think contains nothing that could help the data modelers. There’s a special feeling of scoffing at the thought of the impossible that makes all those slow days worth it. Also, I like data. If you’ve been following me long enough you might remember that I got a degree for research, which is just another way of saying data collection and analysis. Writing views in Teradata that take massive tables and output things that are useful to people, and figuring out ways to use data to inform peoples decisions is honestly fun for me.
I also have started playing with Google’s APIs. They’re basically just Javascript, so picking it up was really easy for me. My favorite project is one that I made to distribute invoices of rent and utility shares to me and my room mates every month. I don’t do a thing, the script takes the utility bill emails I receive and does the rest! I’m also toying with some data aggregation for the LARP I play with, a lot of that game is behind the scenes data management by the folks who run it and I’d like to cut down on how many hours they have to clock in. Those folks do so much work just so a hundred or two players can have fun every month, but they don’t get paid a penny! Expect blog posts on both of these projects as they come along.