Home on Sandeep Gangarapu

Neapolitan style pizza

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 20:17:00 -0600

Yields: 4 pizzas (approx. 280g dough balls) Prep time: Approx. 20-26 hours (including poolish and dough resting)

I. Poolish (Pre-ferment) - Start 16-24 hours before making dough

Ingredients:
- 200g Water
- 5g Honey
- 5g Yeast (Active Dry Yeast)
- 200g “00” Flour
Instructions:
1. Weigh 200g of water into a container.
2. Add 5g of honey and 5g of yeast to the water.
3. Mix well to dissolve the yeast and honey.
4. Add 200g of “00” flour.
5. Mix until just combined (this is a 100% hydration starter).
6. Let it sit covered for 15 minutes at room temperature.
7. Seal the container tightly.
8. Let it rest for 1 hour at room temperature.
9. Place the sealed container in the refrigerator for 16 to 24 hours. (Do not exceed 24 hours, or it may become too acidic).

II. Main Dough

Ten things for the last ten years

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 16:34:00 -0600

This decade coincided with my 20–30’s which is the time when your mind is molded. Here are the ten ideas that I take back from this decade.

“Well, Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
1. In the early 2010s, I firmly believed that pursuing a career in public service was the only path to making a difference in the world. This belief was challenged by a family member who asked whether my father, a businessman, had made any impact. He argued that anyone who genuinely works hard and has concern for others has the power to change the world. This conversation fundamentally shifted my perspective on various professions. It brings to mind the famous response of a NASA janitor when President John F. Kennedy inquired about his role. The janitor proudly stated, “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.” No profession is inferior. An Uber driver for instance, transports hundreds of people each week to destinations where they can make a difference. The manual scavenger clears gutters so you don’t have to. This train of thought also reminds me of a story I came across on HONY.
We overestimate what we can do in a week and underestimate what we can do in a year.
1. This marks my fourth year in the Ph.D. program, and there are days when I don’t feel super productive. Yet, every now and then, when I reflect on how far I’ve come, it’s truly mind-boggling. At the beginning of my Ph.D. journey, with my limited background in statistics, all I knew were concepts like mean, median, mode, and variance. Today, I can boldly delve into computer science or statistics research without feeling overwhelmed. This progress was only achievable by learning bit by bit every single day for the past 1300 days. I recently came across this quote, and it resonates deeply: “Dream in years. Plan in months. Evaluate in weeks. Ship daily.” - @dpatil. Navigating a Ph.D. is an incredibly tough challenge, but consistently showing up daily, regardless of circumstances, has been a game-changer for me during the rough patches. Every monumental task can be conquered by tackling it little by little EVERY SINGLE DAY.
A life lived for others is the life worth living.
1. Everyone questions the purpose of life and I did too, multiple times in the past decade. Money might drive a person, a goal might, love might, but do they provide happiness? prolonged happiness? I came to realize they might not. At least for me. 3 instances gave me prolonged happiness. First, when the stress of my Ph.D. overwhelmed me in my second year, I broke down in tears in front of my mom, and her comfort made me feel incredibly grateful for her support. I felt so glad to have someone with me who cares. Second, when my colleagues at Google expressed their appreciation for my help and mentorship. Third, when I was an instructor for an undergrad course. Every time I taught, I felt this profound sustained happiness. These experiences highlight the importance of family and selfless assistance. I’ve read that helping others is the most selfish act because it makes you feel good every time. Focusing on what you can do for others rather than what you need brings a sense of purpose and fulfillment. In times of conflict, I find it helpful to consider whether I am acting selflessly or selfishly.
2. Long time ago, I read an answer on quora to a question about the purpose of life which stuck with me. The person compared life to a party, where some people are hosts, some are popular, but everyone can enjoy themselves without feeling the pressure to be the life of the party. The idea is to contribute something, have fun, and leave without causing chaos. Life is similar—don’t take it too seriously. Bring something to the table, strive for enjoyment, and make your exit without leaving a mess behind.
If money is lost, nothing is lost. If character is lost, something is lost. But if health is lost, everything is lost!
1. One of my colleagues at Google said this during his farewell speech and nothing has stuck on my mind as much as this thought. Fortunately, I am blessed with good health so far but as I enter my 30’s, I can see the downhill. My hair doesn’t grow as fast, I catch my breath if I run for a minute and I cannot focus on a task for more than 15 minutes. What is the point of the rat race if you cannot enjoy the fruits of it owing to ill health. When I quit Google and joined PhD, made less money, it didn’t affect me as much. However, a day when my mental health isn’t good or if I am down with backache, I can easily notice the impact it has on day to day activities.
Perfection is the enemy of progress
1. This falls into 80–20 rule which says 80% of the work takes only 20% of the time and the rest 20% takes 80% of the time. For example, while making presentations, time and again I delve into making 1–2 slides that I already completed to look perfect. Adjusting the borders, aligning the text, changing font, etc.
Burning bridges is the easiest thing to do
1. It’s often harder to keep good relationships going with patience and empathy than just brushing people off and discrediting them. In our personal and professional lives, it’s way too easy to let our ego call the shots instead of trying to work together and giving others the benefit of the doubt. Sure, burning bridges might seem like an easy way out when we face conflicts or disagreements, but in the end, it only leads to missed opportunities and valuable connections going down the drain. By putting in the effort to really talk with others, understand where they’re coming from, and find solutions that work for everyone, we not only make our relationships stronger but also create a more postive atmosphere.
Our world has changed for the good
1. Despite the barrage of negative news and seemingly endless challenges that we face, it’s important to remember that our world has changed for the better in many ways. As noted by the Gates Foundation and various studies on health and mortality, global progress in areas such as education, healthcare, and poverty reduction has continued to improve. Violence has also decreased over time, and we now live in a more connected and technologically advanced and safe world than ever before. Recognizing these positive changes can help us cultivate an attitude of gratitude and inspire us to continue making the world a better place for future generations.
nanos gigantum humeris insidentes
1. We stand on the shoulders of giants. We see farther than them, have more wisdom than them because we stand on their shoulders, the same way the future generations will stand on our shoulders. Progress and innovation rarely happen overnight; rather, they are the result of countless individuals contributing their knowledge, skills, and ideas over time. Sometimes, tasks may seem overwhelming because we may not acknowledge that what may seem obvious to us is actually the result of the work of so many people across decades and even centuries.
If you are not a socialist in your twenties you don’t have a heart. If you are not a capitalist in your sixties, you don’t have a brain.
1. This quote encapsulates the idea that our perspectives often shift as we age and gain life experience. In our twenties, many of us are driven by idealism and a desire to create a more equitable and just society. However, as we mature and navigate the complexities of life, we may come to appreciate the need for balance between social and economic systems. Recognizing the merits and limitations of both socialism and capitalism can help us cultivate a more nuanced understanding of the world and also understand that everything has two side. Nothing is completly good or completely bad.
Discipline is freedom
1. Many people view discipline as a difficult or restrictive thing, but they often fail to see how it can actually offer them freedom. Establishing good habits and adhering to routines can create a framework that allows us to accomplish more and achieve our dreams. For instance, practicing financial discipline by saving, investing wisely, and living within our means can lead to financial freedom in the long run. By being disciplined in various aspects of our lives, we can ultimately experience greater freedom and autonomy, opening up more opportunities to pursue our passions and enjoy the things that truly matter to us.

Peanut Chutney

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 15:58:00 -0600

Mainly for Masala dosa.

Ingredients:

Peanuts - 2 cups
Urad dal - tbs
Chana dal - tbs
Cumin - 1 tsp
Asafoetida - a pinch
Garlic - 3 cloves
Green chillies - 6
Curry leaves - few
Salt - as per taste
Oil - 2 tsp

Instructions:

Heat oil in a pan.
Add cumin, urad dal, chana dal and asafoetida.
Fry until the dals turn golden brown.
Add garlic, green chillies and curry leaves and fry for a few seconds.
Add the peanuts and salt and mix.
Fry for few more minutes until the peanuts are cooked.
Turn off the heat and cool the mixture.
Grind the cooled mixture in a mixer to a coarse paste.
Serve with masala dosa.

Testimonials from girls who received STEM scholarships at VFF

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 18:39:00 -0600

These are the girls who were directly impacted by the donations we make at VFF-RDT. Reading these makes be double down on the commitment to continue this work and give it back to the community and those who need it the most.

Amrutalxmi

She is the first in her family to go to college. Amrutalaxmi is studying science and wants to become a software engineer. She is one of the 360 recipients of the RDT STEM scholarship.

Under null hypothesis, p-values are uniformly distributed

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 16:44:00 -0600

Central limit theorem states that sample means follow normal distribution. People often confuse this with and question the validity of uniform distribution of p-values under nul hypothesis. Should we not be observing extreme p-values much less ofter than usual pvalues like 0.2 or 0.3?

Imagine if null hypothesis is true. This means there is no difference betweem treatment and control.

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import statsmodels.api as sm
from scipy import stats
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

pval_lis = []
t_stat_lis = []
samp_mean_lis = []

for i in range(100000):
    sample = np.random.normal(0, 1, 10)
    samp_mean = sample.mean()
    samp_mean_lis.append(samp_mean)
    t_stat = sample.mean()/(sample.std()/np.sqrt(sample.size))
    t_stat_lis.append(t_stat)
    pval = stats.t.sf(abs(t_stat), df=sample.size)*2
    pval_lis.append(pval)

plt.hist(np.array(samp_mean_lis))

Distribution of sample means

Veg Ramen

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 11:41:00 -0600

💡 Its all in the broth. Maintaining broth temperature after serving is the key. Heat the bowls, keep everything as hot as possible. Make sure you have enough broth for everyone. Less broth = Failed dish

If you are topping with soy marinated soft boiled eggs, start with this as it takes the most time to prep.

Soy marinated soft boiled eggs:

Ingredients: Eggs, Soy sauce

Bring water to boil
Add large eggs and keep the heat for 7 minutes 30 seconds
In the meanwhile prepare ice bath
Transfer cooked eggs into ice bath to stop them from cooking
Peel the eggs and add them to soy sauce in a ziplock bag and let it rest until we use it in ramen assembly.

Soy marinated Tofu:

Why I donate to Vincent Ferrer Foundation

Sat, 12 Feb 2022 11:36:00 -0600

Annual report 2020-21

Background

Vincent Ferrer started the Vicente Ferrer Foundation in 1969 with his wife, Anna Ferrer, in Andhra Pradesh, Anantapur. The foundation has funded three hospitals, an AIDS clinic, a family planning center, 14 rural clinics, 1,700 schools, some 30,000 houses and the planting of over 3 million trees. The work of the foundation has improved the lives of more than 2.5 million people. This is as of 2009.

Testimonials

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 15:53:00 -0600

Mentorship

“As someone with a PhD transitioning from academia to tech (data science), Sandeep has been very helpful. It can be a lonely and challenging process, and I am extremely grateful to have met him. I feel like I have made a lifelong friend and mentor. I went to Sandeep for mock interviews related to behavioral and technical assessments. He has experience interviewing at all the top tech companies. Beyond that, he has been a support for me through my ups and downs.”

Products I swear by

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 12:09:00 -0600

Notion

Notion is by far the most impactful software product I ever used. I have been using this for two years now and I am still in awe of how awesome it is and how useful it is. This website in on Notion for started. This can be used for managing everything in your life. It is also the perfect project managment software there is. https://www.notion.so/

MacBook Pro

This is easily the best laptop by miles. I used macbook pro during work for three years without a problem. I came back to windows machines (Surface book and Lenovo thinkpad) for five years. There was a day and night differecne. If you can afford to invest in a macbook, just for it. It is worth every single penny. I don’t know if I would say the same about the differences in iphone and an android phone, but in the laptop space, the difference is very clear.

Favorite writing - Motivation for Teaching and Research

Sun, 24 Oct 2021 14:03:00 -0600

💡 I wrote this as an application to a teaching workshop that got cancelled because of COVID-19. I wrote this with a lot of passion and I believe this is one of my best writing samples. Every time I read this, its puts a smile on my face.

I remember the words of the Provost of the University of Minnesota on the first day as a Ph.D. student at the Welcome Orientation “You get 5 years of your life to think big, fail big and make a lasting impact. Make the best use of it.” This is my fourth year in the Ph.D. program and these words cannot be truer. Every time I feel low, I remember the opportunity to explore the craziest of ideas with exceptional mentors, opportunity to stand on top and contribute to the work built by giants of researchers, opportunity to teach and inspire many others through my teaching and research. Academic research is frustrating, especially for a Ph.D. student, yet rewarding in the long term. The thought of working in an academic area for decades, grappling with problems that are hard, making progress every week, communicate complex things in a simple way to other researchers and students, getting those small wins like obtaining that result or finding evidence for your hypothesis is what makes me excited about an academic career in both short and long term.

Vegetable pulao

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 14:50:00 -0600

This is a recipe for instant pot. Similar for pressure cooker too, but once rice is added, you need to put the lid and get 3-4 whistles

Pre soak rice in water.

💡 No need to measure water, just enough to submerge the rice. I observed soaking makes a difference in the final product.

Put the Instant pot in sauté mode. Add some oil. Wait for the oil to heat up. Add ghee if you are feeling dirty.
Add bay leaf, cloves, cinnamon, pepper and star anise.

💡 crush the pepper and cloves for better aroma.

Maggi- Microwave

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 09:19:00 -0600

Get a typical cereal bowl
Put maggi in it
Put maggi masala on top
Pour water on masala until the water line is in line with maggi surface. This will give medium consistency (soupy + dry)
1. Below the maggi surface - Dried consistency
2. Above the maggi surface - Soupy consistency
3. Adjust the levels as all bowls and microwaves are not the same
Put it in microwave and set the timer on default mode for 2 minutes

Practical significance is the North Star

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 06:53:00 -0600

Practical significance is the North Star. 🌟

Why experiment?

At the end of the day we want to know if treatment is better than control and whether changing the status quo is worth it. That is why we do experimentation or derive inference from observational data. Being better is not enough to take a practical decision. Is it worth changing the status quo? Both go in conjunction. That’s where practical significance comes in.

Coffee origins in India

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 00:34:00 -0600

💡 The coffee grown in present-day India dates back to seven beans smuggled out of Arabia in the beard of a Muslim pilgrim.

Coffee is a very sensitive plant to grow. It requires ideal conditions of high altitude, adequate rainfall, shade, and a cycle of hot days and cool nights for a healthy crop. With the Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats in the south of India providing these unique climate conditions, it is inevitable for Coffee to come to India and boom. India is currently the sixth-largest producer of Coffee in the world.

A layman's explanation of Law of Large numbers

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 17:50:00 -0600

The first step is to nail their intuition for randomness. Here’s how I will do it.

I will ask them if I flip a coin once, will it be heads or tails. The answer would be It will be heads! or It can be either! (smart kid). If it is former, I can prove them wrong in 1-3 tries and lay the path for explaining randomness. If it is later, they already have some intuition for randomness.

Who and when should one use Multi-Armed Bandits? A scenario.

Sun, 11 Oct 2020 23:13:00 -0600

💡 This is a humor piece. I am using the scenario to communicate the use of MAB’s. Please take it with a pinch of salt.

A manager at a tech company that sells Alphonso mangoes online is stuck with one of the most difficult decisions. What should the color of the “Buy Now” button be? She recently came to know that data-driven decision making is the new fad and wants to follow suit. She has a meeting with her team of data scientists and marketing folks.

Things I wished I knew before I attempted a solo sub 2hr Half Marathon

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 01:40:00 -0600

Running a half marathon is difficult, but running it under an ambitious time target is a whole different ball game and sometimes is a matter of seconds. Every piece of information can help in shaving off those seconds which can be a difference between 1.59.24 and 2.00.34. This is a post for those who play with those margins. This is by no means an exhaustive list and is completely based on my experience alone. I made an 8 week customized Hal Higdon’s Novice 2 plan targeting a first-ever half marathon, that too a sub 2 hr one. I failed miserably on the race day with a time of 2.24.27. I noticed my mistakes, corrected them, ran another one a week later with a time of 1.59.24. If you care about the backstory of how this all came to place, read below, else, jump to the list of tips.

Thompson Sampling Algorithm for Normal outcome distribution

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 21:46:00 -0600

Thompson Sampling is one of the most popular Multi-Armed bandit (MAB) algorithms - the main reason being its explainability (imagine explaining upper confidence bound to your manager) and decent performance in practice [1].

Many blog posts on the Internet show how to implement Thompson sampling (here, here, here and here). Almost all of them consider Bernoulli outcome distribution (e.g. click or no click, purchase, or no purchase) and use the Beta-Bernoulli Bayesian update procedure for simulations and usually compare the performance (Regret) to other MAB algorithms like UCB or sometimes to A/B testing. However, none of them consider Gaussian outcome distribution and especially the case when both mean and variance of the distributions are unknown (which is usually the case when you are conducting an experiment where the outcome is continuous, ex: dollars spent, time spent, etc.).

The gems from YouTube

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 22:16:00 -0600

This is a collection of unique and awe-inspiring videos I came across on YouTube. These are the videos that I come back to and watch them with the same enthusiasm as I did the first time. These are the videos, the ideas of which I discuss with my friends, and show them.

I wish I could give detailed descriptions for each and why I love them, but, I would be doing them a serious injustice.

My Moka pot brew guide

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 10:32:00 -0600

Brew Guide

Preheat water. Not too hot. Ideally a minute in a medium powered microwave.

💡 Preheating water will make the steaming process faster. This will make sure the coffee grounds are not spending too much time on the stove and reduces the probability of them getting burnt. The aluminum pot can get quite hot.

Fill the chamber with coffee grounds. Fill it full and tap it on the side to spread the grounds evenly. DO NOT TAMP.

💡 Tamping will make it difficult for water to push through the grounds. As there is no machine pressure in Moka pot, the pressure comes from water getting to too high of a temperature which may burn the coffee grounds. Also, make sure the coffee grounds are consistent (no big blobs) so that water flows uniformly throughout.

A day trip guide to Duluth

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 17:34:00 -0600

I traveled from Minneapolis to Duluth and around for the third time yesterday and each time I go, I find that it has something new to offer. Duluth sits on the bank of Lake superior, the largest fresh water lake in the world by surface area. It is huge and spectacular. The view of Lake Superior itself is worth a trip. Duluth could be considered the northern frontier of Minnesota as Interstate-35 ends there. But, there is an entirely new world beyond. It definitely takes more than a day to see every place in and around Duluth, so, if you were to take a day trip, I would suggest visiting 3–4 places, else, you feel like you are always in a hurry and these places definitely deserve your full attention and a peaceful mind. Start early, come late, have multiple drivers so you have a relaxing day trip. There are too many beautiful spots in northern Minnesota to cover in a day. This guide is by no means comprehensive. It is for those who want to visit Duluth from Minneapolis, have a decent trip and want to be back by end of the day. Here are some places in the order that I loved.

Dear Little Brother ...

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 17:34:00 -0600

💡 I wrote this when my brother was just entering the workforce after graduating from IIIT Hyderabad with a Masters’. I was doing PhD at the time and I felt I should write to him something that he can hang on to during difficult times and also encourage him to give his best.

Dear Little Brother,

I cannot tell you how proud I am of your accomplishments so far and the fact that you will soon be a software engineer at Nvidia. You have now grown into a full fledged adult and life will change so much so fast. I have been adulting since I graduated college in 2013 and I came to realize a thing or twenty and I thought I should share some with you. As always, I am all for exploring and making your own path and decisions as the last thing I want is you to be a clone of me. So you can ignore this completely. But if you feel lost, I thought this might help you a bit. You already know some of these, so, this is just to reinforce the fact that they work and you should continue doing them.

Quarantine routine during COVID-19 Pandemic

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 17:34:00 -0600

Day 10 of #SocialDistancing #Quarantine. It’s hitting me a bit, the isolation, the silence. Things I am doing to cope.

News:

Starting the day with this. Anything else seems impossible. Looking at the John Hopkins dashboard and then Google news. The pattern is similar. Shit’s hitting the fan, No. of stupid people are not decreasing. There are some really good memes though.

Exercise:

I go for a run around the block to reset my mind from the news. On average I see 5–6 people walking their dogs and it’s decreasing. But, the small 15 min run definitely helps with starting the day.

About me

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

I am a Data Scientist in Apple’s experimentation team. I help develop the experimentation platform and research to push the way we design and statistically analyze online experiments

I finished my PhD in Information and Decision Sciences at University of Minnesota, Carlson school of management

Before moving to Minneapolis, I worked at Google as an Automation Specialist in the Google Search Anti-Abuse team developing scalable solutions to fight abuse on Google Search.

Activity Stream

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

2024

10 Apr: Delivered a guest lecture about AB testing through the lens of industry at Carnegie Mellon University, Heinz College teaching a couple classes of Masters students in Information systems and one in Public policy. Thanks to Avinash (Avi) Collis for the invitation.

2023

10 Apr: Delivered a guest lecture on “Introduction to experimentation” at University of Texas, Austin.

2022

Dec 8: Spoke with graduates who benefitted from VFF-RDT STEM education for women program that I support.

Behavioral prep

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

💡 The key idea for this interview is to guage what kind of a person, teammate you will be and what experiences you had. This is the best time to showcase your strengths and show that you are aware of your weaknesses and are working on them.

I feel this is more of a damage control round in the sense that you need not impress them with your stories and answers as much as you need to make sure you don’t bomb this or say things that turn them off (eg. I have no weaknesses. I am perfect)

Case study prep

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

💡 Think of case study as some problem that you would arrive at your own company and solve it like you would solve that rather than looking at it as an interview question. This helps me a lot.

https://datainterview.com/ is one of the best sources for preparation.

Structure

Structure in answering a case in very important. Ask why we want to do what we want to do. Ask clarification questions. Narrow the scope of the answer. Take time to think. State your assumptions. Work with the interviewer to get to the answer.

Rubric

The interviewers evaluate your answer with a rubric. Whether the answer is right is just one point a rubric. Most people just focus on getting to the answer and forget that the evaluation is on a lot of other aspects.
Some common rubrics.
1. Did they ask clarification questions
2. Did they scope the problem well
3. Did they structure the problem well
4. Did they arrive at a solution
5. Is their solution technically sound
6. Did they communicate what they want to do well
7. Did they work with interviewer (take the hint) to arrive at a solution.

Business sense

Always understand what the underlying business is. What is the mission of the company and what do they care about. What is their business model
Always state this and discuss with your interviewer why we should care about doing what we are doing.
It helps interviewers assess that you are not just solving the problem, but you understand the top level view.

Mock

As always, the best way to improve upon this is get some professional mock interviews.
They are very effective at evaluating you on a rubric and help you understand your weaknesses.
https://datainterview.com/ is a great place for this.

Best way to reach me is via Twitter or LinkedIn DM’s

Essay 1 - The fundamental problem of causal inference

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

You probably know the COVID-19 pandemic and the race between all the pharma companies to create a vaccine. There was a lot of talk about different phases of clinical trials and the effectiveness of various vaccines. In clinical trials, companies are trying to estimate the causal effect of giving a drug on patient’s health.

Causal effect is the difference between what happened if the treatment was given and what would have happened if the treatment was not given

Essay 2 - What is a causal effect?

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Let’s take a look at this chart.

There is a perfect association between ice cream sales and shark attacks at the beach. When ice cream sales go up, shark attacks go up and when ice cream sales go down, shark attacks go down.

If we were to take this association seriously, in order to lessen shark attacks for public safety, we would cut down on the number of ice cream shops at the beach. Of course, this would not work. The hidden story is that more people go to the beach in the summer and this increases both the probaility of a shark attack and ice cream sales. In order to attribute the effect of ice cream sales on shark attacks, we need to establish that the effect is because of the ice cream sales, not just associated with ice cream sales.

Essay 3 - Randomization - the holy grail of causal inference

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Going back to the red car example, how would we establish the causal effect of red colored car on accidents. In an ideal scenario, we select a random set of drivers and give them a red car to drive for x days and record the total number of accidents. We then go back in the time machine and give the exact set of drivers a grey car to driver and see if the accidents are less. This would give us a causal effect. But unfortunately, this is not possible.

Getting referrals

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

💡 I did not get a single call from a recruiter when I applied directly on the portal. All my calls are a direct product of a referral except one.

Get Linkedin Premium. Its worth it.

A lot of referrals are from connections I made at random places at random times. So its always a good thing to build your professional network even if you are not hunting for a job.

Learning Resources

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Over the years, I have come across multiple resources I learned things from with ease. This is a page to track those resources. Please reach out to me if you think something belongs to this list. I will add it.

General

Julia Evans has online zines for topics ranging from SQL, Shell scripts to Linux. These are hand-drawn explanations of stuff related to a particular topic. I stumbled upon here twitter post about how SQL actually executes a query and have been a fan ever since.

MODE SQL Notes

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Comparison operators
- LIKE is case sensitive
- ILIKE is not
- BETWEEN includes the range bounds
- IS NULL is for missing values. column=NULL will not work.
- For non null values - use IS NOT NULL. Don’t use NOT IS NULL
Aggregate function
- COUNT
  - COUNT(col) gives of count of col where values are not null.
  - This is the main difference between COUNT(*) and COUNT(col)
- SUM, AVG and COUNT can only be used for numeric values. (duh!)
- AVG ignores null values completely. Does not take in the denominator
- MIN and MAX can be used for numeric, date, chars
GROUP BY

Offer negotiations and Timing

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

💡 Companies are NOT doing you a favor by offering you a job. Its an open market and market decides the price.

I don’t have anything new to say hear. everything is covered in detail in the blogs below. These blogs are gold.

https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer/

https://haseebq.com/how-not-to-bomb-your-offer-negotiation/

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

https://scarlet-chen.medium.com/my-journey-from-econ-phd-to-tech-part-3-negotiations-part-1-ead9d72d4157

A recruiter view of offers and negotiations

https://www.teamblind.com/post/kind-of-new-recruiter-ama-a31aHx3q

But I will cover things that were hard for me to internalize.

Will they recede the offer if you ask them for more compensation?

Resume and cover letter prep

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

A great resume will give you a shot at convincing the recruiter to move you forward. It also gets you through any automated system the company is using to filter resumes.

A great resume will

Be relevant to the job you are applying (personalize).
Project your strengths without explicitly saying them.
Be very tight. Every section, every sentence, every word needs a reason to be there.
Always be accompanied by a cover letter.
1. cannot overstate the importance of a cover letter.

Resume is relevant to the job you are applying (personalize).

Prioritize projects so it highlights what the job description says.
Include any relevant projects where you remotely used the tools the job description talks about.
Screening software and some recruiters see if the keywords in the job description matches the keywords in the resume.

Resume projects your strengths without explicitly saying it.

I took Clifton strength assessment to understand what my strengths are and found a way to showcase them through what I did in the project sections without explicitly saying it.
You can take yours here. https://store.gallup.com/p/en-us/10108/top-5-cliftonstrengths
It is $19 and is totally worth it. The assessment not only gives you a path to crafting your resume, but it also gives you language to describe yourself, talk about your strengths and weaknesses.

Resume is very tight.

Every section, every sentence, every word needs a reason to be there.

Technical prep

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

💡 Pay for the premium version of interview prep websites like LeetCode. $30 a month subscription is totally worth it compared to the returns.

Data Science interviews test many technical skills depending on the role or the level.

Algorithmic Coding Prep

This is probably the most important component for software engineering roles, but not so much for data scientists. If you are interested in roles like Research Scientist, Research Data Scientist, then this will become important.

Things I built

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Leather working templates: Horizontal Wallet PDF | Vertical Wallet PDF

Poll Normalizer bot

Tagging this bot will normalize the poll if you have “Show me the results” as the last option by removing votes of that option and normalizing the rest to 100%

https://twitter.com/poll_normalizer

Leather work

Corona Daily Updates

https://coronadailyupdates.org/. - Deprecated