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Wellness Wednesday for December 7, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I am a Python developer that supports Data Scientists, primarily working with the cloud, but also on data ingestion applications, and also some back end work. Flask and Django are back end frameworks. Maybe check out FastAPI too. I’m not sure it takes that long to learn any of those frameworks.

Getting a CRUD app set up on them is relatively simple, the complexity only arises when fulfilling complex business needs. Backend tends to be just knowing the concepts of a REST API, some stuff around web security (authentication/authorization and how to implement), and implementing logic in Python to return the appropriate HTTP response to a request.

What is your motivation to keep the door open? I wouldn’t bother if it’s that uninteresting.

I personally find it rewarding when an application I worked on helps others; that could be automating a process that was very mundane/tedious for someone else, improving the speed/performance of a system to save time/money or increase reliability of our services.

I find actual front end uninteresting. I feel the bugs I encounter are arbitrary, that JavaScript frameworks can be needlessly complex, that it takes a lot of time to get a component to render perfectly in the browser. It tends to just frustrate me, which is why I enjoy back end more.

What is your motivation to keep the door open? I won’t bother if it’s that uninteresting.

I'm not long enough into my career that I feel the need to "lock in" to a specific field. Also, economically, web dev is just about 10x more prevalent than Data Science.

I'm not long enough into my career that I feel the need to "lock in" to a specific field. Also, economically, web dev is just about 10x more prevalent than Data Science.

How does the income distribution look like in Data Science?

In webdev, at least a few years ago, it was multi-modal with a huge deviation. You had webdevs making $30k/year and webdevs making $200k/year. That, and the lack of interesting challenges, were what eventually chased me out of that subgenre.

How does the income distribution look like in Data Science?

I don't live in the US, around the same as any generic developer.

My justification for wanting to know some web dev is not precisely to become a web dev but to be a Data Scientist who also knows some backend Python development, to open a few more doors with what I think should be not much work.

I am far from the next Ian Goodfellow or even the next Dhruv Madeka, so having more doors open won't hurt.