#290: Side Hustles for Data Scientists Transcript

00:00 Are you a data scientist looking to branch out on your own and start something new? Maybe you're just looking for a way to work those exciting libraries that aren't yet in play at the day job. Rather than putting everything on the line, quitting your job and hoping things work out, maybe you should start a side hustle. On this episode, you'll meet Keith McCormick, a data scientist who has many irons in the fire. And he's here to tell us about the different types of side hustles and why you might want to try or avoid a certain one. This is talked by me Episode 290, recorded October 1 2020.

00:44 Welcome to talk Python to me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the ecosystem and the personalities. This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Follow me on Twitter, where I'm at m Kennedy and keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talk python.fm and follow the show on Twitter via at talk Python. This episode is brought to you by linode and Talk Python Training. Please check out the offers during their segments it really helps support the show.

01:09 I got a joke for you. What's the world's most popular ID Excel. Funny, right except many companies really do run on Excel to the point where they would be much better off using clean and simple programming tools. For many pythons data science stack would be vastly better. But moving from Excel to Python is a challenge. Most data science courses don't focus specifically on the Excel use cases. That's why we've teamed up with Chris Moffitt from practical business Python to create a course tailor made for helping people learn just enough pandas and Jupiter to replace the problematic Excel usage with clean and scalable Python code. If you or your coworkers are ready to move beyond Excel, visit, talk python.fm slash Excel or just click the link in the show notes to learn more about this online course at Talk Python Training. Keith, welcome to talk Python to me. Thanks very much I look forward to it. I'm really excited about this topic. As folks who listen to show know I'm very excited about entrepreneurship, about software, businesses, businesses built on open source. And so many of these things. Often I think they seem inaccessible to folks because well, they've got a mortgage to pay or they've already got a job, or they don't have a chance to just go through some Y Combinator accelerator type experience and then pop out with VC money on the other side. And we often hear about people creating side hustles. And for some reason, maybe it's just the world I live in the water I swim in. But to me, I hear that so often on the software development side, especially the front end, development side, but not on the data science side so much. So that's what we're going to talk about today is side hustles for data scientists. Yeah, I'm excited when I reflect back, I've never really thought that I had any special skills or knowledge. But just within the last couple of years looking back, I said, well, gosh, I've been doing this on my own for 25 years, only briefly was a full time. I must have learned something during that time. So I never thought I had a story to share. But I guess if you do it this many years, I've definitely picked up some things. I would think so. And congratulations. That's awesome. You've definitely cracked the code and made it work. If you can do it for 25 years. I was just going to say that, depending on how you count, I guess it's been longer than that because I finished undergrad 91. And I've only had one w two style job. I was an army scholarship. I guess that counts as a traditional job. But I ran a tutoring company. I wasn't a data scientist yet. But I ran a tutoring company, because I had had done some LSAT prep, you know, the college prep stuff after. So maybe that's how I got the entrepreneurial bug. I don't know. But if you start counting from there, even though I wasn't doing data science as an entrepreneur, I guess we're at 30 years. Yeah, I was gonna say I'm a relative rookie. I've only been doing this for five years on my own. And I think the market is probably different. I mean, who knows what it would be like if I were to start the clock all over again. So that will probably be part of what we can uncover is how much yeah, I totally agree. And I would say it's easier and it's harder, it's easier, because it's easier to get the word out. It's cheaper, right? We have all these async communication and collaboration things. We've got GitHub, we've got zoom, and yet there are now millions of people vying for that same attention. So getting noticed, I think is actually harder. So there's like this, you're more capable of getting the word out. But there's because that so many people trying so I think that it's still challenging, but in a different way, somewhat. You know, I think you're exactly right back in the 90s. If you had a conversation about this kind of stuff, potential client would say, you know about that. We need to find somebody that knows something about that. It's not like there was a lot of competition. You were the person I knew that that knew about this stuff. Yeah, yeah. You could write a book and then that would get you. Well, that's the expert. They wrote the book. All right now it's like not

05:00 necessarily going to do it. Alright, so I'm super excited to dive in all these things. But let's start with your story. How did you get into programming? And how did you get? I know you're not exclusively or even primarily doing Python in your data science work. But let's talk a little bit about how you got into Python anyway. Sure, well, perhaps I should mention how I got into data science, and then pick up the programming piece. Sure. So the way that I got into data science was the way that most of us did, who got into this in the 90s. Back then it was expected that you had a substantial statistics background. Now, I think you can get away without that. But at the time, that was just table stakes, you just had to have a stats background. So I somewhat stumbled into statistics. I studied computer science as an undergrad, not statistics, but I was contemplating grad school, and I had to do something to pay the bills. So I was looking for ways to do that. That wouldn't be full time. And I got an opportunity to teach introductory classes for SPSS of the company that made the famous statistics software, right. This is kind of like MATLAB, but it was focused. It's a tool focused on statistics explicitly, it was really popular in the 90s. Yeah, yeah. And boy, I mean, it's been, it's just been around forever. So it actually I'm in my early 50s, I was born in 68. And that's actually the year that SPSS came out. So, SPSS and myself were the same age. And SAS, which of course is also famous, came out just a couple years later, 71 or something like that. So they both been around for a half century. It's really remarkable. In your right in the 90s. They largely dominated the statistics space, but they also completely and utterly dominated the predictive analytics space, because at the time in the late 90s, they were the only game in town. So in SPSS, it was a product called Clementine, which is now an IBM product. So it now was called a somewhat odd name, IBM, SPSS modeler and SAS shortly after Clementine came out and made something called Enterprise Miner, and those were really the tools that people used if they were interested in this kind of stuff. So I backed into Python, I'm in I had studied computer sciences and undergrad. So certainly the notion of coding and thinking programmatically made a lot of sense to me. But SPSS Inc, for whatever series of reasons, chose to make Python, the scripting language and both SPSS Statistics, and SPSS model are so we don't think of those tools if folks are familiar with them. But I don't think of those tools as having a programming component. But just like Excel has macros, these tools have considerable programming options as well. And they decided that the languages that were around in 68, exactly cutting edge anymore, and COBOL is just not doing it. People don't love it for some reason. For a dime. organizations were desperate for COBOL programmers, all of which were basically semi retired, but would be pulled out of retirement to get crazy hourly fees to fix ancient COBOL code that I'm not quite old enough to be a COBOL person. But yeah, the equivalent, you know, like SPSS modeler initially had a kind of a prologue type, but more 90s ai language type stuff. Oh, wow. Now, okay. Stuff like that was the basis of how you would do some basic scripting in modeler. So both SPSS Statistics and SPSS modeler needed to be renovated in terms of their scripting language, and Python was the one that was adopted. So I sought out experts on Python, to mentor me and I took a class with Mark Lutz, which some people might know, because he wrote this big doorstop in comprehensive encyclopedic O'Reilly book on the subject. And then not only as a massive book, it was a good book, it is a good book, especially at the time, I think this was like 2005 or so. So in a sense, I was early to the party. And in another sense, I'm still late to the party and that I've been using these tools for so many years. I'm definitely not a Python all the time. Kind of a guy. Excellent. Yeah, that's really cool. And it sort of SPSS sort of dragged you into that school. So how about now always like to ask people what they're doing day to day? So folks listening, get a sense of where you're coming from? How do you spend your time and stuff? Sure, no, well, let's let's just kind of finish up on the tool thing, because folks might be after having hurdle that they might be kind of curious kind of what my go tool generally is. So that the first book that I wrote was on SPSS modeler, so I'm well known in that community because it wasn't just my book. It was the first book on that subject. And I gathered all of us that were well known in that community and ended up being this, you know, group thing and I was lead author. So I'll always be well known in that community, but that community is shrinking in importance relative to others because it's no longer one of two options.

10:00 Like it was 20 years ago, clearly, and it's not the dominant option, because Python is the dominant option. So I'm known for that. But it's not a big part of my consulting anymore. So the tool that I like to use, if I'm just doing a workshop where I'm working with a client, that's really just starting out, and we don't want to be distracted by the tool, we just want to be able to talk about the project is nine. And that's predictive analytics workbench that's open source that obviously isn't nearly as known as Python, but has kind of a growing following. And the only reason I use that is that if I'm working with a client, I want to be focused on the project, within an hour or so we can be doing very basic stuff, and then the tool fades into the background, which I like. But then for all the other clients, I just use whatever they use, and I find that I can be helpful to them without having to worry about that. Right? Probably a lot of Jupiter. Some are some Python all the above. Yeah, yep. All right, day to day, how you spend your time? Well, in some ways, it's easier to talk about how I kind of carve up my year because let's say I'm going to speak at a conference. It's not like you just work for one company, 50 weeks a year, then you got two weeks off, right? You've got probably as we're going to talk about a mix of things you're doing for different companies, different people, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So it's not even just so if, for instance, if one week I was going to work for client a and then the next week I was going to work for client B, then you would get a sense that my day to day might be somewhat more like someone that was on salary. But my year is all over the place. Because the clients that work with me, generally speaking, I'm not building, I'm not building the predictive model, I'm usually helping them run their teams. And the reason I gravitated towards that is it feels right at this stage in my career. But also because it It fits my schedule better. Because if I'm going to give a talk in a workshop, and Amsterdam or something, I want to be able to tune out and not worry about being up in the middle of the night. You know, when some client meetings like that, I'll tell my clients that I'm out of pocket for a week or 10 days. And to be honest, if I couldn't do that, it probably wouldn't be fun. Because these long flights, you get tired. And you want to enjoy the fact that you're in Europe, or you want to enjoy the fact that you're in Kuala Lumpur or what have you. So the weeks that I'm at a conference, I'm all about the conference. And I'm really just giving an out of office reply for email, but my clients will know that I'm going to be out of pocket for a week or two. So that's maybe 20% of my year is that kind of travel. Oh, the other thing that I'll do, that some of my colleagues don't have, the time to do depends on if they have kids and the age of their kids and different things like that. But a lot of my colleagues have to run home to catch the soccer game or whatever. That's a single without kids. So that's not an issue for me. So I'll tend to stay traveling. And that really becomes a really fun part of Yeah, for me. Yeah, so that's a substantial chunk. And then most of the consulting that I'll do is more like on a retainer basis. So I might have four or five hours with one client and eight with another, combined with other things. And of course, the piece that if folks haven't done a lot of freelancing they have to be prepared for is you have to be interacting with new clients scoping projects, you know, maybe sending out invoices or project proposals. And that's a constant thing. If you're not doing that all the time, you're going to suddenly reach the end of a project and realize that you have nothing going on. So that's constantly happening. And it's something that it's hard to get prepared for how do you get started doing that? You know, it's one thing to say, okay, I've been working at this company for three years, I'm really good at x, you know, building API's doing either doing this type of data analysis, whatever. But that's only half of the story. Like if you want to go into consulting or go into speaking, and you've got to build these relationships and build that it's almost like a funnel, but for your career instead of for a product. Well, absolutely, it's very much a funnel, I think part of it is, is that at a certain point in my career, I would have this kind of boom or bust situation, which is quite common when people try to consult, but it's especially true when you're doing a 40 hour week for one client. So at this stage of my career, I never do that anymore. I would have had to accept those kinds of gigs years ago to pay the bills. But I've been kind of graduated past that, so to speak, because if you are working with one client 40 hours a week for 10 weeks, you got to start from scratch that next Monday. And that's really, really off. So this more retainer like relationship that I have with my clients. Now, I never want to be working with fewer than three to five clients at a time, because it's not like all five of them are going to suddenly reach project end simultaneously. Alright, in Asia, so that's the trip. Yeah, I've heard of this term called productized Consulting, where it's a little bit like what you're talking about maybe if your job is to maintain Jingo websites, instead of saying you can pay

15:00 Me $150 an hour to maintain your site, you could say you can subscribe to my sort of site maintenance service and you pay me $2,000 a month. And I will jump on a problem for up to this amount of time, like almost like a mechanic or a lawyer who needs to jump in and solve a problem. And it sounds a little bit like that. It's very much like, I think it's very much like a lawyer in that if you adopt that kind of a style. Now, of course, at this stage of my career that I'm doing somewhat more analytics management consultant, right, I'm working with the VP of analytics or some director level. So my particular work at this moment in time is a little bit different than what you were describing. But a subscription like that is a fabulous, fabulous idea, because that's exactly how you want to do it. And clients are not going to know if at any given moment, you end up with a 65 hour week, if a gig comes in you say you know I've got something ramping up and I've got something coming to an end, I can power through this one week, I'm going to go ahead and do a 65 hour week, and I'm going to do that knowing that if you didn't do that, you might have a 20 hour week, otherwise, right? If you're subscribing a subscription model or a retainer model like that, you can do that, and you just power through the busy times, right, and then you've got that predictable income, you can also do that to have a different type of lifestyle, not just to sort of smooth out the income differences, right, you can decide, I'm gonna power it looks like there's a lot of work these two months, I'm gonna just power through that, then I'm gonna take a month off and go to Hawaii. And I can do that because that's just what I want to do. And it's Christmas time anyway, like, work is down, you know, it gives you that ability to to make different trade offs. Whereas if your job is to be in a cubicle because they want you there for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, like those trade offs are much harder to make

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17:54 Absolutely, absolutely. So of course you have the option of working from the Y. So yeah, what I did for years now of course, we're all still trying to figure out what long term if not permanent impact COVID-19 is going to have on our work lives. I think we all think that we're going to be working remotely a lot more than we ever did, right? But we're still sorting out all that. But for years, I would look at a map and look at my calendar and say, Wow, I've got to be in Munich, the third week of June. And I've got to be in Amsterdam, the first week of June. I'm going to spend the whole month of June. Yeah. and Europe. Italy. Why not? It's not that hard to take daytime us calls in the early evening and just plan. Plan your day around it. Yeah, absolutely. I live for a year in Germany. And I just had my workday was like two in the afternoon until 10pm. And it was great in the morning. So myself. Yeah, it can be fantastic for the family. Yeah. So I think that's the stage for some really nice ideas, some really nice lifestyles, and freedom and whatnot. But often I think people see it as a switch, right? I hear people talking, like I'm gonna save up a bunch of money, I've got this idea. And then when I'm ready, I've got enough runway that I can go for this long. And I'm going to quit my job and I start this thing. And to me that seems really, really risky. a much better idea is if it's possible, can you build up some thing and show that you have traction in it, because if you can get it to work and you can get traction in training, and speaking in all these different areas that we might be talking about coming up if you can find traction in there, when you're doing it two hours a day will all of a sudden if you can put all your energy into it. It's very likely to be successful, but if it's not if it's just going to spin and get no attention then it's it's going to really be quite devastating if you blow your whole life savings on it. Oh the flipping the switch. I don't think it's too blunt to just say terrible idea. If you

20:00 avoid it. Yeah, I'm sure somebody out there has managed to pull it off. But maybe I can help kind of describe the context of when, what starting out was like. So I can't imagine that the technical training is ever going to go away. Now, it's very different now than it was when I started. Because we have Udemy. And, you know, all kinds of, you know, platforms where there's a lot of content. So the kind of classroom training that I did, where I was teaching classes that were three, four or five days long, you don't see that as much before. But when I started out doing that I was getting paid by the day. And yeah, and this is something people don't think about, but was huge in my life at the time, was that since I was in my late 20s, teaching these introductory stats, software classes, most of my colleagues were full time, but I was getting paid by the day. So I would basically say that I'll teach this stuff anywhere, I don't care if you need somebody in Seattle, or Texas or overseas or whatever, I'll do it. Okay. A lot of the folks that run salary didn't necessarily have to travel because a lot of times they were assigned to the Chicago office of the New York office. Long story short, I actually had more training days per year than most of my salaried colleagues had. So I had a crazy schedule, I had an intense schedule, but you can imagine it was good money, because actually, because I was getting paid a contract rate for more days. And because I would sometimes do 13, five day weeks in a row, which is unusual, or contract situation like that. What it did is it put me in front of a lot of people. And it meant that if some kind of short term engagement came along, it was just a matter of me blocking out two weeks on my calendar, it was really as simple as that. I didn't even have to have a conversation. I just had to say, first half of April on tied up, don't assign me anything. Yeah, that's fantastic. So let's start there. In terms of some of the side hustle potentials, I think this professional training this in person training, even sans covid, right, we got to put that caveat out there. But yeah, in the normal world, this in person training and you know, maybe virtual resume or online training, this is a pretty good way to do it. Because for most jobs, I feel like you can make this something that you can do without your company completely freaking out. Right. So if you're a data scientist for, say, a tractor manufacturer in the Midwest, you could make the case like, let me take an unpaid week, every two months, and do one of these courses, it will make sure that I'm on top of my game, and then I'm a better person for you. And I can help give some internal presentations as part of my regular job and stuff. Like that's a pretty good story, you can tell without flipping the switch that will get you exposure to these clients you can reach out to if you want to go further and so on. What do you think about that? Yeah, absolutely. So let me amplify that even more. I think if someone were to have this kind of conversation where their boss, this isn't a crazy scenario at all, hey, there's this cool conference happen out in Vegas, there's a chance that I could present one of our client case studies and kind of promote the company. They're not paying me to give the talk. But the you know, I've talked to the conference organizers and they think my proposal would have a good chance of being accepted, I get to talk for like an hour. And then don't just do that, right, you might then have free travel, and you're getting paid, you're on your salary, giving that presentation, you know, for the boss, right, then take maybe just like two days off, but stick around and hang out the rest of the conference. Because a lot of travel budgets are a lot of times they say, oh, you're gonna give a one hour talk on a Monday then fly out on the Sunday. And then, you know, fly back on the Monday night, which very early on, I just knew that was not my style, right? So yeah, stay an extra day sleep in and just have a day where you just travel and just chill and don't make it a stressful experience. Well, I'd want to get professional development in there too, though, which is like a key point. So sure, or do some Vegas, everybody thinks about casinos, but there's also some awesome hiking out there. You can really do the outdoorsy thing in Vegas, too, if you care, too. But I would definitely want to make sure that I was attending the conference to not just speaking and then rushing back. But that top of all of that, see if there isn't a way to score a pre or post conference workshop. Most conferences have them. Okay. So maybe somebody is really fantastic at a particular Python package or they've got some skill. Maybe they're an early adopter of something new, reach out to the conference organizers, and say, I noticed that you've got a post conference workshop and X, Y and Z. Would you add one on my topic? Yeah. Or even be a little more pre emptive about it and just like apply to do that workshop far in the future, right, right when the call for proposals or a call for papers opens? Sure you absolutely could do that. But in my experience, sometimes the paid stuff is curated. Okay. So it's not so much proposal based. It's more like the draw right. All conference organizers need two kinds of content they need

25:00 Need the kind of content that they offer so that everybody gets a chance to speak. That's like the case studies and stuff. And then you need the draw. The keynotes are being paid. And that's presumably why people want to go to the conferences to see the keynote with concurrent sessions, let's face it crawl to be honest, we kind of cross our fingers with one of those concurrent sessions. And we hope they're good. But usually, we don't expect that much, we just hope that we're wrong about that, it turns out to be great, but you expect the keynotes to be great, and you expect the pre and post workshops to be great. So in my experience, you have to kind of sell yourself on the conference organizer, that one they want to add that topic, and that you'd be a good person that presented. But if you do that, now you're getting paid to go to the conference by your boss, you're taking a couple of days off. And I would be upfront with my boss about that kind of thing, because they were like, somehow you talked them into giving a workshop on that topic. That's fabulous. You know? Yeah, yeah. And take the story tell is This is making me a better developer, better data scientists, for as one of your employees, I'm coming back better, right. And it doesn't cost you anything. And yet, it builds these relationships, and it builds these funnels. So let's talk just a little bit more about getting in the training side of things. So one of the challenges is, I want to get into training is making those connections. So you can do speaking, and you can do blogging and other stuff to make those connections. But then you get a big company, they call you up and say we want this. And that's interesting. But we also need this variation and that other thing, and you have very little materials to present from, right, you've got to go and basically write your educational materials. Or you can go and work for some established training company that already has those relationships, already has the materials and just need somebody to put it all together someone to actually do the presentation. So that's another option. There's so many companies that have these, like very loose consulting relationships with experts, right places like went to lacked and other companies that are they've got the sales team, they have the relationships, they have the materials, generally, but they need people to hire experts. Yeah, that's all very true. But I think the first step, the first step isn't the entrepreneurial step. That's more like the second step. The first step is you kind of have to be almost like a secret shopper in research in a topic that you feel well versed in, or that you're super intrigued with random, it could be something you haven't mastered yet, you're you got some competence, but you're super excited about it. You have to research how people that want to learn more about that topic, get trained, because that's indirectly going to lead you to what that training market is like. So it could be the vendor that, for instance, I use our studios. I know they do webinars and things I don't I've never researched that market, like how much our studio does. Workshops. I'm sure they do. But that's where you would start. You'd be how many conferences are there a year? I'd even get very specific about it, I would say, Oh, I found this cool topic. How many times can I find this offered a year? Is it always the same? instructor? That's one of the first things I look for? Is it somebody that is in one particular topic, let's say for because I happen to be a gg plot to fan so obviously, sometimes you'd have Hadley Wickham, given some kind of GG plot to talk, if he's the only one that's talking about it at all the art conferences at this point to be enough demand for it that that would no longer be the case. But if it's always him, and you're going to be competing with Hadley, Wickham, teaching GG plot to not going to happen, right? But I doubt that's what you would find. If you research that in 2020. I don't think he'd be the only one teaching GG plot to so you'd seek out and say, Okay, how many conferences offered something like that? Were they part of the conference fee? Were they a paid event, in addition to the conference fee before after, this is all the kind of stuff that you have to know? Because naturally, if it's part of the conference fee, it's probably free? Well, it is free conference goers, so therefore, the conference organizer isn't, doesn't have a lot of cash to spend on that. If it's a special additional expense before or after, and it's a topic that you're really good at and think you could present Well, what may be happening is sometimes they can't find someone in a particular city to present that. So that's another thing too, is if someone lives in a medium to large city, yeah, look for events coming to you. Maybe there's expert that isn't available to travel to that one. If you're local, you don't have to charge travel to the organizer. And they're gonna like that. Yeah, they do like that. That's definitely somebody could promote to at least conferences that cover travel and say, Look, you don't have to pay for me, I'm already here or I can get myself there with a car or train for almost nothing. Another thing in this realm while we're on this side of the things is, webcasts, webinar type things. So that's a lower bar, I think often than speaking at a conference, right? You can approach various groups, right, like I know JetBrains has a bunch of extra

30:00 People give presentations on stuff. And if you're really good at some aspect of data science and you're willing to, like, use their tools to present it, often they'll say, yeah, sure, we'll use our platform and our audience to let you do that presentation. We just did one with Chris Moffitt and had 1100 people sign up with sending out one email and one, a couple of Twitter messages as a pretty big group of people at all, we didn't have to organize a conference or convince anyone, we just put it on the internet and told people about it. Right. So that's also an option. I agree. Now, the difference there is that there's a good chance that something like that isn't going to get paid. I mean, obviously, sometimes, I've been paid quite a few times to do a webinar. But I've also done a ton of free ones. But absolutely to do it in terms of the visibility. And you got to think that that option is just going to freeze exactly in frequency because whole conferences have gone online with COVID-19. And I think that may be permanent in that some conferences will choose, I have this crazy theory that some conferences will go every other year, every other year, why and every other year online, I've never heard of anybody else. Interesting saying that, but I just have a feeling that's gonna happen. The other thing too, is that there's usually a team for vendors that's in charge of such things, like nine has what they call the evangelism team. Those are the folks they're their employees that write the training materials and do various things. But think about it. If you belong to that team, you don't always want to be the face of that, like all the time, you know that if you mix it up, it's going to be of interest. So if someone's willing to volunteer an hour Now granted, that our webinars going to take you a day or two to prepare, it may be stuff that you already know, not that you don't know what you're going to prepare examples and so on. So it's going to take some time, particularly if you're new with that kind of thing. But if you just simply found who the training team or the evangelism team with an organization like nine and just said, hey, I've got this interesting topic. Do you have any webinar slots coming up? I'd volunteer my time. I just, I'm excited about the topic, and I want to share it with the world. They're not gonna turn you down. Yeah, usually, they're just looking for content like that, like, what are we gonna do this month? I don't know. It's the middle of the month. We're starting over. Awesome. All right. I definitely agree that those kinds of things are awesome for the visibility, not for direct income, but they build that foundation that you can sort of branch out to. So we've covered training, we've covered conferences, consulting, I think mixes in there, we talked about that. You mentioned books, but what about writing, give us the story. We think the data science side hustle of like writing books, maybe even magazine articles of those are still the thing I know there's some that do pay actually for that. Even maybe reviewing a book? Yeah, no, that's interesting. Yeah. I think of like freelance writing, like magazine articles, I think of kind of people that spend 10 years sending short stories to the New Yorker. And then I'll take everyone picked up obviously, in the duck Nowhere is very different. Exactly. Forbes, I haven't I haven't written for Forbes, but they have an interesting model, or even medium, things like that. So that's not an area where I have a lot of experience. But absolutely, I think that it is available. I think I should probably briefly tell the story of my first book. So it came out in 2013. When when I would have started on that the first one tends to take forever, because you're learning the ropes of just how books work. So I think that I probably wrote the proposal for that in 2011. So I would have been a 12 or more years into my career from like, the busy part of my career even. And I was just always kind of scared to do it. I don't even know how to start. But since I was well known and the SPSS modeler community, I reached out to, I don't know if everybody has heard the acronym, crisp dm, it's the cross industry standard process for data mining. It's very much on the machine learning side. So some people may be familiar with it. Okay, I reached out to one of the co authors of chrystia because I knew him, he knew me. And I said, Why do you think it is that no one's ever written a book on the basics of using SPSS modeler, and I knew him I wasn't afraid to reach out to them. But I did think that the chances that he would want to collaborate on something were slim to not because he was so much more well known than me, he was the author, it would be like, it'd be like doing something with a co author or Bajaj or something, you know, I mean, just by definition, he was well known within the community. And what he said, just stuck with me because I think it's so often true. He said, I kind of always wanted to do it myself, but I was just too busy. So if you're less experienced, less well known, but have the bandwidth reach out to these people that are expert and well known because usually they have those two things, but they don't have the bandwidth. And then there you go, you could pair up. So we put together an outline, I was all ready to shop it around to publishers something that I didn't know the first thing about how to do I truly didn't I was completely lost in this project. All I knew was that I wanted to do it and I had such an amazing co author lined up

35:00 That I felt like I couldn't fail. And out of the blue, I got a LinkedIn message from a publisher that wanted to do a slightly different book. Now keep in mind that no one in the world except for me, and this one other person knew that we were working on an outline, but it's just so funny that at that point in my wife that I felt I was ready, somebody else decided I was ready. So we skipped the intro book, or rather, we delayed it. And we ended up doing my first book, which is a IBM SPSS modeler cookbook, because it's so the whole idea of a cookbook. And of course, all the coders will know this is lots of short examples where you address something very specific, right? And it's not like it's sold like Harry Potter. But since it was the first of its kind, and the publisher knew that that's why they were looking for authors. See, that's what people don't realize is that publishers have topics that they want addressed. And they are seeking out authors to do that. I think it's just like when you apply to college, I get like every other week, I get contacted by somebody. Hey, Michael, I'm the acquisition editor for so and so we're looking for a topic a book on this. Are you interested? No, I'm trying to run my business. Yeah, you're gonna have to find someone else. I'm sorry. But this is just not. But yeah, you're right, that because I still see that. I saw that last week. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, well, you and I think have probably figured this out at this stage in our careers is that the reason that they're reaching out to you is the things like this podcast that you're doing, right. But now that you're doing those things, now, you're, you know, busier. And not only that, the other thing that people don't realize is that they probably think the first time they get an email like that, Oh, my gosh, am I worthy of this, you know, inquiry from a publisher, they really want me to write a book that's so amazing, you know, and then you realize, eventually, that it's almost like a spam thing. But the concepts and publishers and book topics vary in quality. And then eventually you find out that not all of them are worth doing. But we put it together. And it was with, frankly, one of these publishers that does reach out. And that way, it's some pact, the name of the publisher, because their whole strategy is they're super aggressive about the search engine optimization thing, if they see that something's coming up in Google search, and there's no book written about it, they want to book about that right away, they want to be first to market they're on it. Yeah. So it's not like getting a contract with Random House or Wiley or when you hear about these politicians, or famous people getting million dollar book advances, that is not the kind of book deal that we're talking about, right. But they know that there's a hole in the market, and they want to find somebody to do it. So as long as somebody has a reasonable amount of competence, that's going to be enough to be able to score the book deal. And what we were talking about earlier is sufficient. I did three webinars on the topic, I did one conference workshop, yeah, somebody could achieve that in a year or two. And that would be sufficient. So I could have written my first book years before I did it, but I was afraid to try, right. And if you don't have an audience, it's not a bad route to go. I think one of the really big challenges of so much of this is getting awareness, and getting attention and getting people like you might build something amazing. Or you might create an amazing book, or course or something. But if people don't pay attention to it, it doesn't matter, right? It's just it's such a busy world. So like for me, it doesn't make sense for me to try to partner up with one of those guys and spend a year and a half writing a book because I can reach so many thousands of people weekly through the various podcasts and other formats that I have. But if I was working at a company passionate about a thing, but had basically zero following, it seems like a good choice. But at least the first time well said really, because you're not going to make money, you're not going to make money from the book, not these kinds of books, right? The only kinds of books where, you know, I'll meet authors that make a pretty good income from the book is more the Harvard Business Review type on leadership, communication. I guess one of the best selling books of all time was the one minute manager somebody was just telling me that a couple of days ago that that's not the kind of books that as data scientists were going to write. So right, your mileage varies, as they say, but we're talking you should be able to make a few thousand dollars. But oh, I've got a great way to actually kind of bracket what can be expected years ago, I don't know her last name, but the Lynda of lynda.com. I'm embarrassed that I can't remember her last name because she's famous. She started, you know, a training business. And she was one of the first to realize that, oh, maybe we have to do like videotapes and DVDs. You know, this was not that long ago, but you know, she started 15 years ago, maybe? Yeah, maybe a little bit more than that. Could be could be 20. Yeah. Could be 20. And of course, she ended up selling to LinkedIn for 1.5 billion, which is a really nice paycheck at the end. Not everybody is going to get that. Yeah. But the reason I bring her up is because of people want to get an idea of what a home run is and the technical book space because I don't know what people's expectations

40:00 Right. But years ago, when Linda and her husband wrote their first technical book, I think they made something like 60 or 80,000. So you take into account inflation, maybe that'd be like 100,000, that would be considered absolutely rock star, amazing, amazing royalties for a technical book, most people are going to be a 10th of that, or less. Yeah. And I've read that a lot of books don't even sell, you know, 1000 copies the first year. So that's an absolute home run. So someone that thinks that they're going to retire on a book or something not going to happen, because that might be one of the most successful technical books in recent memory with because it's notable because she used that to start her company. Don't count on that happening. Yeah, absolutely. I think so many of these things can be thought of as like layers that you add on, that allow the next step to be taken, allow the next thing to be successful, right, you're not necessarily going to get rich off of that book. But if you write the book, and then you get well known, you do some speaking, and then you do this other thing, you do the startup? Well, you might be in a much better place to have that startup be successful if you hadn't done those things. Absolutely. You know, I had a conversation, it was a brief one on one conversation. It was a private conversation. It wasn't in a public setting, but I don't think there's any harm in sharing it, I was chatting with Michael Berry, who some people may know because he kind of does the conference circuit from time to time. But he's now head of business to business on TripAdvisor. So he's a very successful data scientist, his co author, and friend Gordon Lin off is got a senior data science position at the New York Times. So they're both like super well thought out. He was in one of my training classes. Now, of course, at the time, he was already an author, and much more established than me, but the reason he was sitting in was purely because he needed to learn the tool. So he was right time, a SAS person and wanted to learn the SPSS equivalent. So you can imagine having a well known person like that in class, at the end of each chapter, I would say, well, like what would you like to? Michael's comment on Keith chapter, you know, kind of a thing was kind of fun. But he approached me during a break. And he said, he, you know, you seem to be pretty good at this. I noticed that you're training, I'm kind of surprised that you're not consulting enough. The answer that I gave him was, the thing about consulting that's working for me right now is I'm doing a five day week after a five day week after a five day week, and I just keep on getting my daily rate. And there was an age difference and experience difference. So I felt just a little bit bold to say, and I'm guessing that the way you and Gordon have structured your consultancy is that you probably aren't billing 22 days a month. It doesn't work that way. You said you're right. He said, but you know, what happens is when you have gaps in time, you have to use that effectively. And what he and Gordon did is wrote their first edition of they're both actually wrote several books. But they said that was just when whenever there was a week in the phone wasn't ringing, we would chip away, chip away, chip away at the book. And when that first book came out, he said the phone never stopped ringing after we were slammed after the book came out. Wow. So and you know, that was their first book would have come out almost 30 years ago now. And they've been full time data scientists freelance and salaried that whole time. So it really was the beginning of they were already well established. But the beginning of a very successful career was writing that first book. So that's why you do it. Yeah. Very interesting. Okay. So let's focus on a couple other areas that I think will be very exciting for people. I guess. There's always the startup, right. And I think there's some interesting areas in which data scientists can create startups, right, you can go and pull different data together, using screen scraping using API's, you know, sorts of stuff, and you can come up with inferences and trends and expectations, you can sell that data back to people, right, I think that that's a really decent way to maybe create some kind of API or some kind of system, where you really want to know about this market, not just this one thing, we've brought it all together, we've got the infrastructure to keep it up to date, and it's worth you to pay 100 or $1,000 a month to that you just get that data and you don't have a team that has to track it down and clean it and deal with it. Yeah. And you know, this is really interesting, because if you think about the story that I just told about Gordon in one off, and in my own experiences, being in my late 20s, in the late 90s. This obviously wasn't an option that was available to me at the time. But I can see that absolutely. This route could be the equivalent of that first book for many, where if the app is successful enough that it's a worthy component of their portfolio, they don't have to retire on the app, the app could be the basis on which they become a freelancer. So again, it wouldn't be something that was available to me when I was starting out as an option. But I think it could be the equivalent of that. I mean, if someone is more excited about a startup option than they are about writing a technical book, I mean, if the

45:00 notion of reading a technical book leaves in the cold. And I'm sure for some people it does, you know, if this is what they're passionate about, it can absolutely be the same credibility builder that a book would be, because that's what you need. I mean, there's no question that the only reason I get paid to speak, whether it be a keynote or a conference workshop with regularity, it's not enough to be my whole year, but I've never pursued it to be enough. But on the days that I'm doing that I'm making good money, those weeks that I'm focused on that there is no question that the reason I can do that is the books. So everybody needs a credibility builder, and apps and startups could be that, for sure. Let me lay out another path. I think this, there's a lot of cool ml stuff and predictive stuff that I think that if you could bring enough data together, and you could predict the outcome in some market, or in some area better than anyone else, you can sell, I'm pretty sure that you could find a way to sell that to companies that want that prediction to be made. And they're already asking people to do it, but they're not doing a good enough job. And if you got specialty in an area, chances are that area doesn't have this thing. That said, another interesting path that I see, especially in the Python space is popular, well accepted. open source library creates a open source plus company. So examples of this are the scrapey API for web scraping, those guys went and found a scraping hub, which is web scraping as a platform service, right. So they've got the infrastructure, and they've got the distributed, whatever, got all the databases and the the caching. And you can just say I want to take that library that you wrote, it's open source, but I want to have you run it because of all the challenges of getting blocked and whatnot, web scraping, Matthew Rocklin started along with Hugo brown Anderson, they started coiled, which is dask distributed Python computing as a service. So dask is open source Free Library. coiled is the task as a service, we have explosion, ACI AI, which is spacey, the ML, open source library, but explosion is like more tooling and labeling stuff on top of it as a paid service. So over and over again, where I'm seeing these companies that are founded by the lead person of some really popular open source library in a way that doesn't undermine the open source aspect of it, but builds on it, it says, you really love this, well, here's what you can do with it. Now, that's a pretty long runway, because you have to have a popular open source library, but having a popular open source libraries, also something you can sell to your company and do as a side hustle pretty well, because very rarely are like, are you creating a library that does web scraping? We're gonna have to fire you, because you're doing that in your spare time. And it doesn't make sense like this is such a conflict of interest. You just don't hear that very often. I mean, certain circumstances maybe, but it seems like something you could do pretty easily. And if it's really successful, then you're ready to take that step. On top of that. I agree. Being a somewhat old school machine warning guy, one of the topics that I'm incredibly passionate about is feature engineering, how can I add that little bit of spice to a model to get it to take off and as I was listening to you, I was reminded of the fairly recent Zillow competition, and I guess there were three guys that ended up ensembling their solutions, but what I remembered was that one of them just concentrated on one component of the problem of the home value, this one piece, and that was commuting distance, not distance, like we're all flying to work in a helicopter, because most of us are not, you know, but dealing with public transportation and all those variables. So he would take all these addresses and just try to crack the code on that. No one else right on his team did that. So I can totally see how if someone just focused upon addressing one small piece of the puzzle building upon available open source tools, that one again, that's credibility building, but also I agree with you, but it could also be marketable. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That's an interesting challenge. Because it's not distance. It's not even following the map to sense it's like, time time is the thing you actually care about and commute not actual distance, which is not so easy. Exactly. That's what impressed me too. Yeah. Yeah. As somebody who has been working from home for a long time. I'm very happy. I don't have to think about that. All right. Let's talk about some other areas. You mentioned the Zillow thing. There are some competitions for data scientists that I think have monetary payoffs, right? I think kaggle has some monetary payoffs and some other ones as well. What about that? Yeah, well, again, there's always I think, if you shoot for the credibility, and you get the credibility and the money, it's kind of like one leads to the other. So kaggle was an interesting case, because there's the big prizes, but h2o dot AI, open source company, the number of folks are probably familiar with, they have an advisory board that they've assembled of a bunch of kaggle grandmasters and it's really something because you go to the conference, and there's about 15 of these folks up on stage.

50:00 But the other way that they're using them isn't just to parade them around during the conference, which is, for me, apologies to them slightly humorous to have this, it's almost feels like you know, they all like March out and you got 15 people on a panel, it's somewhat of a little bit crazy, because how can you have 15 people on a panel? But the other way that they utilize them? Is the ask these folks, what would you do in the context of their auto ml product development, trying to image using them almost like you would develop an expert system to build models. So what's occurred to me is that you can come in and the top hundred, even probably in the top thousand and some of these kaggle competition, and you have bragging rights, even if you don't win the big prize. And even if you don't win the big prize, there could be because I'm sure these advisory boards are paid. I have no doubt if they're flying around a period of conferences and stuff. They're getting paid to be on that. So you might be reached out to for advice. Laura's that's what a device that's all that what consulting is. Because you did well in a competition, even if you didn't win. Yeah, very interesting. I agree. One of the areas I feel like makes a winning scoring high in a kaggle competition is quite challenging. Creating an open source project and then founding a successful open source. commercial business on top of that is quite a big step in a long runway, something that's much shorter that people could get started with sooner, would be mentoring. Just I feel like mentoring is a low grade consulting, right? You don't have to come in and say, dear fortune 500 company, I have this expertise better than your employees. And all that this way is usually I get messages like this all the time. Hey, Michael, I'm really trying to do this thing. I'm a little bit stuck. It's been here for a while. It's frustrating, can you help me? And I always almost always have to say, No, I can't, because I'm so busy doing all my other stuff. But there are places you can go where you can spend an afternoon helping somebody get paid for that and sort of develop that experience of more corporate consulting type of model. Yeah, definitely. And there are a lot of folks, including what have you in their, in their 20s that have done YouTube channels or various things on the side. And I increasingly see that you'll encounter somebody like that. And they'll have these calendar, like there's tons of apps that will where you can, you know, do a calendar. And they'll basically just say, if you have a question, pick a time, yeah, 100 bucks an hour on up kind of a thing. And that's definitely an interesting way to do it. So I would think that if somebody was starting with zero reputation, and they used one of these sites, you know, Upwork, or what have you. And you know, people complain about the rates, and that it's not like a great deal. But if you did that for six months, and tolerated the fact that you were getting paid, maybe not great, but getting better at it, I don't think it's a huge leap to go from that to part time Python help desk in the evenings or in the weekends, for another six months or a year. Now you're making a good hourly, you're just not doing a lot of it. And then next thing, you know, you have a mailing list. Next thing you know, you have LinkedIn followers, and there are folks that do that kind of thing full time. Yeah, absolutely. The YouTube thing is interesting. Let's come back to that for mentoring. And I have not used it personally. But code mentor.io seems like a pretty good two sided marketplace you go there's I have expertise in this. And I'm willing other people's I need help in that. And they don't match you up hired. and places like that are also pretty good at making those connections for consulting setups. Up works interesting. So I hire some people to Upwork. And I've had really good experience for the most part, people I've worked with for years through Upwork. And it's been fantastic. I think the software development side of Upwork is a bit of a more of a bit of a mess. I'm not entirely sure. But a lot of times people ask me, how do you get started, right? There's this chicken and egg. I'm only going to hire somebody who has experience. But if I'm new, how do I get experienced? So I can get that job that requires experience? Right? Like, how do you make that? How do you break that cycle. And to me, I feel like those places like Upwork actually have a really good opportunity. We like you over there. And if you get paid $15 an hour to build something that's gonna sound like it sucks. But if in one month, you can say my experiences, I built that thing over there. And I can show that as part of my resume. All of a sudden, you're no longer a completely unknown boot camp, graduating data scientists, you're now a professional developer stuff published in production you can talk about, right? So it's, I almost see that as an opportunity to get one of these an internship, almost, you just got to kind of you know, it might not be the best experience and it might be it's not the right way. But for people who are having a hard time I feel like you can use places like Upwork to, like take a half step into professional development and then use that to take the next step and get going. I agree. I think you just have to if I

55:00 was because again, my first related gig was teaching the software classes. So that's how I got my foot in the door. But if I was looking for a way to establish some credibility, I mean, getting paid something to build up a portfolio seems to me better than unpaid, unless the unpaid is a fabulous opportunity, which some intern, unpaid internships might be, right. Yeah. So I think you just tolerate the fact that the pays not great for six months, because then you have a portfolio but be looking for the on ramp for something better, but I don't think it's crazy. I mean, there's a lot of negative feedback about it, because you know, the rates aren't great, or they take too much of one of the feedback sounds not unlike what Lyft or Uber drivers would say is that the reality is once you take into account fees, and deductions and everything that you'll be disappointed with what you're left with, but I agree with your characterization, which is you're building a portfolio, it should be quite short term. I can't imagine that somebody would want to do that for more than six months to a year. Yeah. But I do think it allows people to break that cycle of I have no clients that have no experience. And I'm looking for that job where they say you need to have some experience in this. Like, there's not just a thing I did on GitHub as my free time. But there's a professional thing and production I did, you don't have to say how you got the job, you don't have to say how much you were paid for it. You just say I worked as a professional data scientist for six months on that. Right and Okay, great. Looks like you know it, let's do it. Right, you're hired? So I think that's fantastic. People should not discount that, in my opinion. All right. Really, really quickly. Let's riff on one final thing. And then I have an analogy for folks, I guess. What about teaching at like a community college or part time at a university or something along those lines? Well, I've been doing that now for about five years. And I find it to be really, really valuable. I doubt that I think this is more of a mid career option, because obviously, you have to have some credibility, right. But yeah, I find that it just, it seems to be I mean, I can really only go based on like body language or something like that. But it seems like when this comes up in conversation, there's a little bit of that, wow, you do some teaching for them just seems to be kind of like a cool thing. So I know, there's a lot of demand for it. So you don't have to be the most famous person in the world, and the topic that you're going to teach, but you do have to be mid career. So again, it's were just one or two paid workshops at a conference, you've done one book, and that one book maybe sold 800 copies for not so amazing publisher or whatever, right? I mean, it doesn't have to be amazing. But things like that taken in the aggregate, right, would be enough to be able to teach, certainly, you know, a basic class or something, because there's a lot of demand for it. And then you're getting quite a bit of credibility associated with that. And data science is interesting, because at least for the time being, you don't need a PhD. Because until recently, there weren't PhDs and data science. Exactly. So I only have a bachelor's, I don't even have a Master's. And I teach several courses a year for UC Irvine in their certificate program. But again, it's based on my years of experience, you know, so I would say, how many years would somebody need maybe five or eight or 10. But it could be Yeah, it could be what separates, you know, in the mid career phase, it could be what separates you from getting accepted to give conference talks from time to time and getting a chance to do your first keynote, I don't wanna be overly dramatic about it. But that's the kind of thing that might make a difference. Because a conference organizer might want to say, not just Keith's been doing this for five years, but he's written X number of books, teaches for UC Irvine has a LinkedIn morning class or whatever. So you never know what that first puzzle piece is going to be fall into place. Yeah, but they all build off each other. Yeah, definitely want to emphasize that these things layer, and that they're additive. A lot of the times you touched on YouTube, just really quickly, I guess that's actually a really interesting thing. As well as you could create a YouTube channel that basically does live coding of a bunch of stuff, or does like a live code review. Let's walk through and popular open source libraries code. We'll do another a different one every week like that. Those kinds of things could build credibility and build an audience, which, once you have an audience, so many of these things become not just possible, but relatively easy. But having that audience is dramatically hard to get true. This is true. So I've been at this for many years, we've established that. But when I was starting out course, social media wasn't a thing, right? So it's not like I wasn't aware of it when not paying attention to it. But it's really when I started doing LinkedIn learning courses that I really started to focus on that because my assumption is I'm sure it's correct that the more LinkedIn followers that I have, the more people will find the courses and vice versa. So I've been this year in particular since I have not been traveling with COVID-19 going on. I said, Well, here it is. I've been thrown into a situation as dramatic as COVID has been at times this year. That it

01:00:00 feels almost like a sabbatical. This is the first time I bought this house in 94. And this is the first time in all those years that I've been home for six months straight, I believe. Yeah, that crazy. Yeah. 8520 year. So I said, Okay, well, here it is, if we're going to be work from home, at least for the time being, if not for quite a long time, then I'm going to focus on social media. So I've been learning how to grow followers and all the various things that you do. But I have in my journey of figuring that out. I've met folks half my age that have 100,000 followers, because yeah, whereas I was busy doing other things in the first few years of my career, that's one of the first things that they figured out that they leveraged. So that in and of itself is a skill. And if someone's going to go that route, there are ways to crack the code on that. And I've met people that have gotten that many followers in two years. Yeah, amazing. Okay, let me leave you with an analogy that I'm fond of you give me your impression on this. So all of these things being side hustles would be typically taken as a side project while you maintain your regular job, that you're then going to either just keep doing for additional money, leverage and do a better job at some point. Or you could quit and make it your full time job if it was super successful, right. But at the moment, the side hustle part is on the side. So extra work, right. So one of the analogies that I like to think of because I went through this somewhat with my job, I was working full time, at least in a pretty intense job, started the podcast, worked on it a bunch of grew into another podcast, now have two podcasts, and eventually quit that job and use that foundation to start my online training course. Now we have authors, we have a bunch, of course, and so on, right, so but for the first year that that was, let's do these two things at the same time. And if the other one takes off, maybe I can put more energy into it, right, I didn't really necessarily know that it would, but it was fun. And let's see where it goes. So my analogy is to do with rocket launches. So when a rocket takes off, it's you know, full power as it takes off, it's going and going and going. And it gets going faster and faster gets to just about 1000 kilometers an hour. And they have to like power down. I call it max q where there's the maximum aerodynamic pressure on the rocket as it goes through the sound barrier. So it's like under the most pressure, and then eventually, once it gets through that barrier, it's easy for it to go, they just power back up and it goes up to 18 20,000 miles an hour or whatever it just takes off, right goes out in space. So I kind of think of side hustles in this analogy of Max q like at first, it's going to get harder and harder and harder to do both of these things. And you're going to be pushing against the air or whatever. And it's just like out, it's just so frustrating. But at the same time, like if you can make it successful enough that it could be your thing. And you can like I said before, if you couldn't do it in two hours, what if you had 10 hours a day and all of your energy, not when you're tired at the end of the day, from eight to 10pm? You could if you're successful with two hours, you can definitely be successful with more time and energy. So think of it as max here, right? You've got to like go through this early stage, like extra hard journey of trying to juggle both things. But eventually it's going to lead to something better. I agree. I've never thought of it that way that completely resonates with me. And I have a couple of quick examples. And remember, if you just look at my year, this year, okay, my last travel gig, you know, this COVID-19 year here 2020. So my last travel gig was in March, that was chaotic, because of COVID-19. Right, I get home, and my co author, hey, Zeus and I had to work on the fourth edition of one of our books. So while that was going on, I wasn't paying attention to other things as much as I should, because you think fourth edition, or you just added a paragraph here or there. That is not really to check out the code, things. Things that used to work in the software four years ago now have a slightly different command or whatever, right, and anybody who's been through it will tell you. So we were talking about the layers earlier, when I was going through that book revision, I wasn't seeking out new clients, I wasn't focused on social media, I wasn't keeping up with my blog content that was kind of stealing my extra bandwidth, right. But then that was over came up for air. And I recorded a new LinkedIn learning course. But while I was recording that, I wasn't doing a lot of writing, right. And then more recently, I've been doing this focus on increasing my followers on LinkedIn, because part of that is learning how to do it, posting every day and so on. I couldn't have done all three of those things. At the same time. If I've been doing a book revision, a new course and focusing on social media, it would have killed me, just the context switching alone. Yeah, you have to take turns, because otherwise you're not going to get through it. So if somebody has a full time job, it's great to have a half dozen ideas, but you'd better stagger them, or you're not going to make it you're not going to make it through. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, Keith, I think we're well over time, but it's been really fun. So let me just ask you the final two questions and let you get out of here. Sure. All right. So if you're going to write some code, what editor do you use? Oh, I'm on our studio.

01:05:00 fan. Okay. Oh yeah, very cool. I've heard good things about our studio, I've never done anything with it, obviously doing almost all my stuff in Python. Very cool. And then notable data science package out there, like a library that people could use that you think is really awesome that you want to recommend the joy working with? Well, I mentioned GG plot too. Yeah, I'm just a big fan. Part of it, as you can imagine is what are things that I incorporate into my courses, whether they be UC Irvine and so on. And not only do I use defy to, I sometimes teach it so that I'm a fan of that one. Right on. Also, I should mention, like some of these ideas 75% or so that we talked about came out of your LinkedIn learning core, so called side hustles for a data scientist, so I'll be sure to link to that in the show notes as well. So final call to action, people are looking to explore something different, something more, maybe they don't get to work on exactly what they want to work, and they have this passion, and maybe some kind of side hustle. Where you Tom? Well, you know, I say to you know, seek out the kinds of things that we've been talking about one that didn't come up with that I think is a great one is try to find a way to be a technical reviewer on a book. And then all you have to do is check out your library of technical books, author that you admire cinema, email, and ask them when they're doing their next addition and volunteer to help out. Yeah, I'm sure they would appreciate it. Actually. It's a lot of work. Awesome. Yeah. It's hard to find a good technical reviewer, and it's not crazy money, but it usually is paid. But hey, that's a great credibility builder. Not only that, it's a fantastic way of networking with someone that is probably pretty well known. Yeah. All right. Lots of great advice. Thanks so much for being on the show. I appreciate it. I enjoyed it. Yeah, great. Me too. Bye.

01:06:37 This has been another episode of talk Python. To me. Our guest in this episode was Keith McCormick, and it's been brought to you by linode. And us over at Talk Python Training. Simplify your infrastructure and cut your club bills in half with linode. Linux virtual machines develop, deploy and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Visit talk Python FM slash linode. And click the Create free account button to get started. Want to level up your Python. If you're just getting started, try my Python jumpstart by building 10 apps course. Or if you're looking for something more advanced, check out our new async course the digs into all the different types of async programming you can do in Python. And of course, if you're interested in more than one of these, be sure to check out our everything bundle. It's like a subscription that never expires. Be sure to subscribe to the show, open your favorite pod catcher and search for Python. We should be right at the top. You can also find the iTunes feed at slash iTunes. The Google Play feed is slash play in the direct RSS feed at slash RSS on talk python.fm. This is your host Michael Kennedy. Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate it. Get out there and write some Python code