While the KenKen project may have been my last project at Metis, my studies haven’t ended there. In fact I would say they’ve only increased. Most days I wake up around 8AM, shower, eat, and by 9AM I begin coding. I don’t stop (except when necessary) until around 1AM the next day. Then I sleep and start again. This might sound agonizing but I actually don’t mind it. I love what I do and I couldn’t ask for any more.

So what exactly have I been studying? I’m glad you asked! In the beginning I focused on the things I felt weakest during Metis which included Hadoop and SQL. I took Udacity’s Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce and definitely felt more confident in my ability to write MapReducers afterwards. Sometimes this course got painful with how many times you had to write MapReducers but that’s probably because I did the month-long course within 3 days. Still, I definitely recommend it to anyone.

After that I focused on the SQL. I began by doing some challenges on HackerRank and it just so happened the next day there was a SQL competition. I entered it and focused on it the whole day. I learned a ton and despite MySQL (what I had been coding in) going down for about 2 hours, I placed 28/1577 (not bad but it was probably because there were 10 challenges with overly complicated queries and not many people were willing to buckle down for all those hours to write in SQL).

Aside from the Hadoop and SQL I’ve been mainly focused on trying to make up for the things I missed out on in a normal college degree. This mostly includes a deeper understanding of Python programming and improving my abilities in the use of algorithms. I started out trying to read books and watching a few videos (Udacity, Coursera, etc.) but what I found to help the most was to read a book I had from college (which is at last getting some use) and to do the HackerRank algorithm challenges.

So it’s mostly been a wild ride of programming and studying. I haven’t really applied anywhere, mostly because I want to feel as ready as possible for whatever job I do apply for. Next on my to-do list is to send out the applications, continue studying algorithms, review some machine learning, and hopefully start some Kaggle challenges with my friends!