Official Role: Cat Herder

When I think back on what I've done most this summer, scheduling is what comes to mind first. With three team members working full-time jobs and a slew of varied summer travel plans, it's been challenging to organize our schedules. Speaking for myself, I had classes Tuesday and Thursday nights for six weeks, spent one week at the beach, and then went to New Orleans for a long weekend. When you multiply that by four, it's easy to see why I've spent so much time on Slack messaging people about meetings and assigned work.

So, I'm grateful that I'm able to work from home and avoid complicating my work time with travel to VCU for meetings or classes. More often than not, I work at my dining table because it's convenient, quiet, and tidy. I don't keep other work on that table so when I sit down with my laptop, I can really focus on getting some work done, whether it's a quick 30 minutes of communication or a few hours of research. This is also where my team and I conduct meetings because we're able to spread out and I've got easy access to my kitchen, from which I can dole out snacks and cocktails as needed. 

In terms of real accomplishments though, I'm proud to say that we've nailed down the crawling and scraping technique that seems to be working for most of the retailers' reviews that we've attempted to grab. We've been able to scrape Nordstrom, Madewell, and J.Crew and are seeing our recurring process work better every week. 

I also met with the team from Nixon Peabody to discuss an existing patent I'd found. I was worried we were going to be butting up against it with my idea and I was happy to learn that it was "probably" a non-issue. Not only did the NP lawyers believe our idea was distinct from what was a broadly written patent, I also learned that it was issued in the early aughts during a period when patents were being issued much too freely so if we are taken to court, it's unlikely to be upheld. 

After speaking with Aniket and Adam last week after my meeting with Garrett, I've also been spending a LOT of time educating myself more on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and their associated tools. I've found a number of videos on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPLop4L2eGk&list=PLLssT5z_DsK-h9vYZkQkYNWcItqhlRJLN) and Lynda.com (now LinkedIn.com). I also got temporary access to Pluralsight (https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/understanding-machine-learning). Since we're using Amazon Web Services (AWS), I'm in the middle of a course on Amazon SageMaker (https://www.linkedin.com/learning/learning-amazon-sagemaker/machine-learning-with-amazon-sagemaker?u=76209018) and learning how it deploys predictive machine learning models. I've found these helpful because I want to be able to speak more fluently on the processes we're working on and it's also exposing my developers to some new and sometimes even basic concepts that they're finding useful. 

Finally, I'm spending a lot of time researching other apps and websites to finalize the U/X design that we'll be using to complete the front-end in the upcoming weeks. This has been a much slower process than we initially scoped out but I keep reminding myself and the team that it doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be done.