Me Trying to Get My Life Together 🫠

🍥 Life

SOOOO FRIENDS! It’s been a while. How have you been?

Wow, so summary of the past month 👀

🇨🇳 Part 1: I run away from China

I ran away from Mainland China → Macau → Hong Kong → Vancouver. That was a wild ride…check past newsletters for context. 😵‍💫

🎄 Part 2: I hang out in Vancouver for a bit

It just so happened that a lot of my friends were in Vancouver for the holidays and I met up with several people I hadn’t seen in years! It was amazing to reunite with them and the holiday season was a much-needed respite from the craziness of China.

📹 Part 3: I live in a creator house

I lived in Salt Lake City for most of January with Zach and Ken. Shashank and Li also came to visit. You may already know Zach, Ken, and Shashank from Linkedin/Youtube but Li is someone I met on this trip and she’s so inspiring! She’s building a startup called SylphAI that is redefining flexible work in the AI space. Talking to her also got me thinking more about the future of work ie. how do you leverage technology to design your own perfect career?

Me and Lulu (Zach is her human 💜)

📖 Books

I’ve read a bunch of books since the last newsletter! Where to even start? Okay, I’ll review Predictably Irrational, which is one of my favourites.

Science to back up the fact that I am indeed irrational!

The book challenges the conventional economic belief that humans make rational choices aimed at maximizing their well-being. If you’ve ever bought useless things and then wonder why you did that afterwards, you would agree that this assumption of rationality often does not hold. 😅 The cool thing though, according to Dan, is that although we are irrational, we are predictably so. This means that we can change our own irrational behaviours if we become aware of them.

It’s a surprisingly practical book and got me interested in the subject of behavioural economics. Highly recommend!

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🌻 Learning & Productivity

I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, mostly for how to self-study and learn things more effectively. And omg if you haven’t already, I HIGHLY recommend that you check it out. I’ll even link it for you here!

Here’s a prompt I gave it assuming I want to learn data science. 👇

It’s not perfect but it’s quite a good start!

I do find that the more specific you are the more helpful ChatGPT is. Say, if I were specifically trying to implement a random forest model, I could ask something like this. 👇

It also seems to be decent at generating starter code and code templates at least. I think you can’t completely rely on it, but it’s an incredible tool to help you code faster. If, for some reason, you are really into cows. 🐄

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Of course beyond coding and technical subjects, there are many other things that ChatGPT can help with. For example, I became kinda into fengshui because of this guy. 😂 I have been terribly unproductive recently, so…

It does make sense. 🤔

I think ChatGPT is what Google was in the 2000s; it’s going to fundamentally transform the way we think, work, and interact with each other. Okay enough fangirling for now - should I make a video about how to use ChatGPT for learning things?

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👨‍💻 What I’m Working On

We’re working on the next iteration of Lonely Octopus! 🐙 We went through the feedback from the beta and are in the process of finalizing the specs for the next launch. I’m going to be announcing the launch date in the next couple of weeks so do stay tuned! 💜💜

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💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)

💰 manager vs. individual contributor salaries?

Oracle is comparing the monthly wages of their employees in each department to those of their managers and co-workers.

You have been tasked with creating a table that compares an employee's salary to that of their manager and to the average salary of their department.

It is expected that the department manager's salary and the average salary of employees from that department are in their own separate column.

Order the employee's salary from highest to lowest based on their department. Your output should contain the department, employee id, salary of that employee, salary of that employee's manager and the average salary from employee's within that department rounded to the nearest whole number.

Note: Oracle has requested that you not include the department manager's salary in the average salary for that department in order to avoid skewing the results. Managers of each department do not report to anyone higher up; they are their own manager.

employee_o

Head on over here to answer the question!

*Btw if you’re prepping for data science interviews or just want to keep yourself sharp, Stratascratch is a great platform with 10k+ real interview questions on SQL and python coding, probability, product sense etc. You can use my code ‘tinahuang’ at checkout for 20% off ❤️

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P.S. All constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)

-Tina