Alexandre Trilla, PhD - Data Scientist |

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-- Thoughts on data analysis, software development and innovation management. Comments are welcome

Facelifting my homepage while sticking to my long-term research/engineering projects: writing and coding

20-Jul-2013

The first point of this post is that I'm a little fed up with changing the style and layout of my homepage and I want to set on a clear line. I'm a little dazed and confused with so many tweaks, not to say what this can mean for my readers (I beg your understanding). Nonetheless, I usually despise the critique focuses on style first and content second. It is positive feedback from the latter that provided me some work as a freelance, for example. Anyhow, I need a sort of stationary brand that identifies me with my research engineer role. And lately that I had come up with a catchy title, "researchineering", that is the portmanteau of "research" and "engineering", the two terms that best define my professional career. I first thought this was great, but now I see this is overcomplicated, missing the simplicity goal and straightforwardness that I pursue. Now I just go with my bunny (that was a present drawn on the back cover of Steven Levy's masterpiece) and a most simple design: no more double content column, no search box, and no lousy online resume (I am a curious telecom engineer in Barcelona, I speak English and I code, further details, Linkedin).

Sticking to a long-term project is one important determination. And here I am with my 5-years old homepage, right after having renewed the service contract with my provider. I'm ready to keep on sharing my thoughts, my rants... seeking to produce fruitful content that is of interest (at least to me), in addition to hosting online services that serve me well to validate business hypotheses with the real world (I don't want to live in a vacuum), and to improve my skills by iteration. I want to be constantly learning something new (sometimes re-learning for the sake of clarification), tackling challenging projects and reporting my experiments here. There is high correlation between good writing and good learning, because writing entails learning. However, I am not an assiduous writer yet (I still tend to code more that I write), but I'm trying to develop into one. I am deeply content with Google Reader shutting down because this forced me to clean the dust off my old rusty list of feeds (I had long wanted to so that but never found a moment to do it), and now I have a frightening amount of accumulated content that deserves my reading and posterior digestion here.

In the end, writing is a creative process to acquire experience. It is a social activity that exposes one's work to others and reveals how to turn good products into great ones. But there is no creativity without facing the fear of failure. However, I guess the first step to overcome this fear is to maintain a publicly accessible blog. Done. But the challenge increases with time to write better and to keep up with the reader's expectations (well, I did mention I love challenging projects, so that's fine). Learning to write (and to speak publicly) is a requisite to become a good software engineer. This takes time and a lot of deliberate practice, just like programming. And to maintain the professional appeal, one must do something that obviously takes a lot of effort and time, showing one can do the job. Hence, there I go. Writing and coding are my reasons to be here.