It is a very interesting day. As most days, I was pretending to work when I randomly got an Ad about having your own website to show off the portfolio. I has been a while since I stopped using Facebook or Twitter, and I just lurk in Reddit for most of the times. I thought I would try making one for my own for fun so, I headed to namecheap to check if there’s any cheap domains. Of course, I am burmese and burmese people are not into getting their own websites if it is not for commercial purposes. Tons of Htuns and Tezas are available, but I thought I will just be playing around so I got a .xyz domain for a year costing me a buck.
At first, I thought I would just let the domain redirect to my linkedin, which I properly maintained, because I don’t think I am willing to pay half a hundred to host it. On the other hand, it’s a shame since I got think to build my own space optimized for search engines. After a couple minutes, I found myself on this ridiculously easy to follow guide on how to host your own website on github pages, written by Jonathan McGlone. So, yes, after 12 to 15 hours of work, I now have my own hteza.xyz which is built on the basic framework suggested by the talented Mr McGlone. Actually, following his guide took only like half an hour, but me having no knowledge on html resulted in this ridiculous workload. I do not think this is perfect and I will continue to work on it. One good thing is that I got my confidence back from it.
See, I now work as a data scientist, working with health data. My daily work, excluding the pretending to work bit, includes me extracting, transforming and cleaning the electronic health records so that we can apply these for secondary data research. But before the two years of my masters degree, I have NO experience of working with Python, R, SQL or Stata. Health records are all paper based, and my closest work back in undergrad was typing in survey forms into SPSS datasets so that the postgrad students can use those in their thesis. So, when I first started my masters, it was an enormous crash of learning curve coming in waves after waves; not knowing how syntaxs work, parallel classes between Python, R and MatLab, learning biostatistics from the beginning. I managed to; I finished my project, I got my paper, I graduated on time, I actually am the first graduate out of my cohort. I always worry that I would have lost that edge, which is the same reason I would like to do my PhD soon. It’s typical for people to worry about turning 30, and I worry too, but for the reason that I might go slow. I still want to know more and I still want to learn new things happening everyday. Today is a productive day, which has reassured me that I am not yet dull at the age of 26. Let’s see what I can do more next year.
