I admit I have been absent from the community spotlight lately. Well more than lately. There has been very few speaking engagements, missed SharePoint Saturday events, few blogs posts, tweets, Linked In posts over the past 2 years. It seems longer than it really has been. For the last 2 years everything has been put to the back burner as I headed back to school.
For the last 2 years straight, I have been hiding out in coffee shops early in the am, staying up late in the evenings to work on a Master from the University of Illinois, Champaign, Urbana. My program focus was Data Science and I specifically drilled in on data mining and text analytics. Along the way I worked in C, C++, C#, SQL, Java, R and Python. I worked with machine learning, SQLite, Spark, Map Reduce and Apache Giraph (very interesting by the way) to name a few technologies. I worked on PCs, MacBook and Ubuntu VMs, on-prem and remotely. In 2 years, I cut a wide swath in technologies.
I can finally say I turned in my last project and wrote my last paper. Barring any surprises, I have completed the program and waiting the final grade posting and graduation. Sometime soon I should see that Master of Computer Science degree show up in the mail. Finishing school this semester will coincide nicely with my trip to SharePoint Conference North America in Las Vegas. That’s a nice way to end the semester!
Now, I seem to have some extra time on my hands, a white board full of thoughts and ideas collected over the past few years. I have a OneNote section with a lot of half-completed speaking abstracts and blog posts. Some of these are SharePoint-related and some are data-related. So, after a short break to catch up on some reading, enjoy some spring weather, I will be back in the community. At least that is the plan.
