– Learning two different programming languages at the same time is strange – like learning two foreign langages at the same time. I’ve been using R for most of my PhD, and feel quite okay with it, and with it’s philosophy. I’m learning lots of new things – the kind of stuff, one only learns when somebody with a wide knowledge is explaining it PROPERLY. But still, the R thinking has made me lazy. Learning Python makes me notice. I have absolutely no idea, why python needs a while or for loop so frequently (well, I have, but why is there no such thing as lapply in python?).

– I am the queen of typos: writing more or less complex function is no massive problem, but there will be inevitably a stray bracket somewhere.

– Project ideas! I need one. One my my “colleagues” came up with an idea for media recommendation that involved scraping data from a company (“I just change my IP as soon as they block me.”). Well, if they’re blocking your IP when you scrape data, it means they don’t WANT you to steal their data anonymously. At this point one might at the very least ask them whether they would give you access to the dataset you need?

– I am thinking about a project moving around either social media and prediction of x. Or something around finding flats for sale/sold flats, and trying to predict the price development. Please not a recommendation algothithm. The world doesn’t need another one.

– I haven’t seen Sascha Lobo today.