“A professional is an amateur who never quit.” -Richard Bach
This quote is on my homepage and defines my experience in the world of programming and data science. While I am by no definition an expert in the this arena, I have managed to optimize some pretty significant projects with the help of Google, Stack Exchange, and Udemy, an online teaching site for a wide variety of topics.
One such project that had a very low cost-benefit was optimizing my company's on-site oil analysis machine. For context, oil analysis in the worlds of maintenance and reliability is an extremely useful tool for determining a machines health and diagnosing early failures to allow for optimized planning. Though the will to do the job well was present, the technological support from the oil analysis vendor; this lack of support manifested in premature failures and wasted oil products to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars per year. There was also little incentive for the equipment vendor to go the extra mile as the sale had already been made.
I became determined that this was an area where solving a puzzle could add real world, timely benefit to my company and coworkers. Using the website Udemy to take a SQL basics and SSMS course and with a little help from a fellow nerd, I was able to find the parameters I needed to create a dataset that would allow me to do time-series trending going years back and costing no extra money in subscriptions or services.
This project required no external consulting fees and will continue to be a value add for the life of the machine. With the added platform of Microsoft Power BI, this tool can turn anyone who is familiar with excel and graphing into an oil analyst in the span of an hour. This project also required no herculean effort in programming application or ability, just a little sweat and and a whole lot of google. It is a prime example that value adding projects can come from anywhere and be competed by anyone as long as the foundational mindset is centered on continuous improvement and willingness to make a few mistakes on the path to being a professional.
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