Applying What I Learned While Curiosity Grows—at NowDream
Fresh out of college, I tried hard to apply what I learned as a Statistics major—things like penalized regression, ANOVA, and t-tests. But it was tinkering with a Linux server and tools like Hadoop and Hive that really sparked something new in me: an interest in computer systems and the craft of software.
This was my first job as a data analyst, fresh out of college. With coursework still fresh in my mind—though no longer the case now—I remember earnestly trying to apply everything I’d learned in school: penalized regression, ANOVA tables, two-sample t-tests, you name it.
But what left a deeper mark on me during this period wasn’t the statistics.
This was the first time I encountered remote development. Back in school, my “IDE” was just a local desktop app—RStudio. But now, I was accessing RStudio through a browser, connecting to a remote machine running RStudio Server. At the time, this setup—an IDE in the browser, running off a desktop tower in the corner of the office—felt like dark magic 🧙♂️.
To interact with that server, I had to use an SSH client like PuTTY to connect to it, which opened up a Bash shell running Linux. That was my first real exposure to a Unix-like system. I was so fascinated by the terminal that I’d log in just to mess around with shell commands and utilities. It was completely new to me, and it was fun.
It was also the height of the big data hype cycle, and I got to dip my toes into tools like Hadoop and Apache Hive. In fact, HiveQL was the first query language I ever learned—well before I touched SQL proper.
Looking back, that experience—more than any specific data analysis task—is probably what first nudged me toward the world of computer systems and software engineering.