Introducing Myself and My New Project
In my job hunting, I’ve been led to believe that one of the most important skills in finding work is being able to present your own skills, talents and abilities to others (especially to those that you would want to ask for employment). And one of the best ways to do that, is through a portfolio of projects and work that demonstrate that, yes, I do understand and know what I’m talking about.
The data fields are something I’ve wanted to get into for some time now. Data analytics, data engineering and data science all lend their various specialties to the massive amounts of data that we produce just in the normal course of interacting with the world at large. So, as someone who firmly holds that any problem can be solved, or at the very least, any question can be answered, if we just know the right information, the data fields are like finding a hidden treasure that was hiding in plan sight.
From childhood I’ve loved rats and have wanted to do something to contribute to the pet rat hobby. Let’s just say that I discovered the reptile and snake hobby very quickly and from there realized that while the reptile hobby was full of good people, it was very bad to its feeder rats. So I’ve wanted to start a side business, a tech-based operation for the humane and ethical breeding and raising of feeder rats (and other feeder animals).
To that end, I want this portfolio project to be something related to this other project of mine. Essentially I want to build a data platform that tracks the major feeder rodent companies’ product availability, pricing, assortment of product and market positioning over time, then to use all this data for useful and strategic planning.
For a heads up, regarding the use of AI: The entire point is to show off my own skills both in how to think things through and how to translate those thoughts into code. So aside from some slight help with organizing and outlining the notes that become these blog posts (though not the posts themeselves) and possibly some code documentation, I’m not going to use any generative AI