The current state of things

March 26, 2020 by Kenny

It’s amazing how life gets going in a rhythm, and you get your head down and working so hard, that you sometimes forget to look around (or in this case, write in your blog).

Working at a small travel advertising company is a really great thing – until almost all travel ceases, and no one is advertising, and you suddenly find yourself unemployed as a result.

So today I am taking a moment to reflect on what I’ve learned in the last few months. One of my projects gave me the opportunity to work with Vue.js for the first time, and I basically taught myself what I needed to know in order to get it done. It was a good challenge, and I learned a lot.

Mixed in with that I was trying to find a way to query data for a reporting tool that involved millions of rows of data, which was being used by the sales team. The tool already worked, but our team was trying to find a better way to run the queries so they didn’t take up to several minutes to run. We were dealing with behavioral data, and there was a lot of it. The dynamic nature of the queries meant that the more conditions you added, the slower the query might run. Along with that I was trying to normalize the way the data was represented so that other types of queries could all be run the same way, and even be mixed together. Talk about a complex problem! But we were making some headway with it, and then the corona virus hit. We went from a growing thriving company to zero income in two weeks.

The other technologies I was working on were crossfilter.js, dc.js, and d3.js. I did video courses on each, and got to mess around with them a bit using real data from our system, although I wasn’t ready to actually do any graphing just yet. I knew where I wanted to put them eventually, but that was further down the development roadmap.

I guess now, I’ll just need to find a way to work with these in some personal projects to improve my skills, and keep them sharp.