Data Science Retreat, Day 1 – The Nerd Shock

Disclaimer: I’m German, and my parents think “Not complaining is enough praise”. 😉

I was waking up really early (5.30 am!), got myself a coffee, and decided to quickly update my computer to MacOS Yosemite . Spoiler: This was a spectacularly stupid decision. But more to that later.

On the way to the tube I ran across a Sascha Lobo.

I got to Zalando’s offices fairly early, entered, was welcomed by the organiser in the entrance hall and ushered to the seminar room in the 9th floor. There: billions of cables. I think they had every cable ever produced, to connect monitors to the laptops people brought. The place looked like the mutant child of an unholy wedding of an IT storage room and a student union office.

The view from the 9th floor of Zalando’s Mollstrasse offices is fabulous – even when it’s very overcast. You can see until Prenzlauer Berg.

The people were … mostly a bunch of nerdy looking people. The small talk starter at lunch was the question “So what do you prefer, MongoDB or MySQL?”.

Women (among trainees): 1 out of 10 (incl. me). Women (among teachers/mentors): 0 (up to now.)

There was no internet. How can there be no internet? At some point there was really slow WIFI. And there was cable LAN – but I don’t have an ethernet plug at my computer. I also don’t usually carry a thunderbold-to-ethernet adapter.

My (own, personal) computer lagged massively, up to the point that it was completely unusable. (I blame the Yosemite update.). Later it turned out to be caused by Ghostery (my tracking blocker browser plugin) and/or the WIFI. As soon as I turned off both, everything was running smoothly again.

We covered the basics of python (I am a python idiot novice), and I found that afternoon really useful.

It’s noticeable that the programme is still fairly new. There’s the odd non-organisation here and there. But hey. Next time, they’ll probably send around the software requirements in advance. Then the 80min it took for everybody to install python, anaconda, and iPython notebook might be filled with more useful teaching.

The environment and people are quite charming. And smart. And did I mention charming? Yet, I usually work for an internet agency that sells brand consulting, shiny web applications and marketing. Our style is very different.