alder.stream

I had the pleasure of working on a really fun project at Angel Studios called Disbursements. It cut a month-long quarterly process into something that can be run in a few hours, and saved about $100,000 annually in wages spent on running the process. This was a dreaded financial process in which we pay creators on a quarterly cadence to meet our contractual obligations and maintain a relationship with them. We get revenue from different platforms, we split that revenue up by creator, and then we pay the creators for the revenue they earned. Sounds simple enough. However the reality was that the process has been plagued by problems for years. It took a data scientist a full month every quarter to process the data and generate reports. Reports were often wrong or incomplete - creators would often complain that their historical earnings went down, for example. Reports were also not transparent, so the creators would have no way to know if calculations were done accurately or not. Combinin...

I often think about "thinking about work". Meta working, or the work within the work. Doing it all day is counter-productive - none of your actual work will get done. But I think it's crucial to take a step back and think through the reasons you're doing the things you do all day, look for better ways, and not be just a participant in your job but a planner. Don't just be the construction crew, be the architect. Don't just execute, design. If you never take a step back and think critically about what you're doing with your time, you might find out that you were on a hamster wheel and just wasted 6 months or a year of your life. Here's an extreme example of what it looks like to never question your work. The scanners I was working at a previous job in another role, and sitting across from me I watched some interns scanning medical records day in and day out. The company had purchased a clinical trial and along with it came 1 million pages of paper in 45...

Summary Hammerton is a high-end decorative lighting manufacturer based in Salt Lake City, Utah. My work at Hammerton as a Financial/Data Analyst has consisted of ad-hoc reporting and analysis work on a diverse series of projects to analyze and improve business processes. These projects include, but were not limited to: Repricing over 30,000 SKUs of the company's main product line under time pressure. This involved calculating product costs and gross margins by calculating the cost of overhead to produce a product + direct material costs, and acting as a project manager coordinate with multiple departments and executive management to figure out what we will sell and at what price. Building dashboards for Quality to analyze service order data. Updating database fields to simplify the chart of accounts for Accounting. Creating a randomly sampled list of inventory to audit inventory counts. Reconciling discrepancies between purchase orders (what we ordered) and accounting (what we thin...

I use this project with permission from the company where I work as a Data Analytics Engineer. Summary Health Catalyst is a healthcare consulting firm with 1,000 employees, 1/3 of which are data engineers who consult at hospitals and clinics. The business case for my work is that management has to decide how all of these engineers are allocated to clients. I worked closely with management to iterate constantly according to their needs and feedback, resulting in over 20 versions of the project over a 3 month period. I also worked with stakeholders to validate data and get access to new data when needed. I was able to present a finished dashboard to senior management using advanced SQL, ETL tools, and Power BI. The project was managed by myself using agile techniques including a Kanban board with tasks, daily standups, points meetings to assign value to tasks and retrospectives to discuss project progress. Project Overview The project was completed in stages, though these were done itera...