Post about this Blog

In this post, I want to describe my intentions and motivation on starting a blog. I guess it is something I wouldn’t have done a year ago. First, because I wouldn’t know what to write about and second, because I didn’t know how low entry barriers are, due to projects such as Hugo. So lets get started with a small introduction.

This is me

I recently concluded my master studies of Industrial Engineering and Management at the TU-Berlin. Even after seven years of studying I’m not entirely sure, how many people know about this field in the real world. So, for those who don’t know, it was invented as an interface discipline between the business and the technical side of a project. Our kind is mostly seen in Logistics and everywhere where things are produced. I chose my technical focus to be on civil engineering.

Unfortunately, civil engineering and the surrounding industry don’t want to use the advantages of computer and digitization have to offer. Maybe it is worse in good old Germany, compared to the rest of the world, but the practical methods taught at the university drove me mad. Everything seemed a little outdated. Luckily, the department for Civil and Building Systems was created to change that. Here I was introduced to practical machine learning, computative statistics and integrated building modelling, which lead my ever since to different working experiences and my master thesis. For those who are interested, here is my current CV. For sure, I should soon transfer it into a nice html scheme.

Why am I doing this blog?

There are several reasons, why I think it’s a good idea to start a blog.

First of all, as I was approaching the data science filed during my studies, I was looking into a very wide range of tutorials, blogs and open resources on how to learn R and data analytics. I saw a very welcoming and vibrant community and most of its members were publishing their work by blogging about problems or talking about it in podcasts. A non exhaustive list of examples is Little Miss Data, simply statistics or variance explained. While working through their posts, I always thought about participating in this community.

Variance explained is made by David Robinson and in one post he explicitly encourages all aspiring data scientists to start a blog. I think I agree with his main arguments. As I’m not coming from a traditional data science field, I continuously have to work on my skills and it is a good idea to do it publicly, so I’m able to build up a small portfolio, which represents my work and can be useful on different occasions. Finally, if my posts are read by someone, I even might get some feedback on my work

Just another blog about data science?

Yes, I hope I can get close to the quality I admire so much at all the other blogs about data science. So if that works, I’m happy enough. But do I think I can do contribute something special? As mentioned above, the construction industry just started to discover digitization. My target is to stay up to date with the current development in construction and apply my learnings from data science on to that domain. Currently, I have no precise idea how to do this, but I guess this would have the biggest use for the community and more ideas will pop-up in the future.

In summary, what will happen on this blog:

• Data Science, cause its great
• Innovation in construction
• Connections of the above
• For sure I can’t help, but to also write about
  • New Tech Stuff
  • Podcasts

My main targets here are:

• working on my skills:
  • become secure in python
  • stay strong in R
• do tidy tuesday regularly
• encounter & present nice projects
• keep up to date with innovation in construction
• force myself to be productive