2022 Year in review

With the year done and dusted, it's time to look back at the year that was 2022.

Published less

2022 was a busy year, with a few different things taking me away from writing. The hectic nature of the year meant that I wrote far fewer articles in 2022.

Since starting this site, I've realized that I prefer to publish when I've got something to write rather than producing content for content's sake.

Despite the lack of time this year, I completed three articles. In reverse chronological order:

• Recursive CTEs in SQL Server
• 6 lessons from a Machine Learning project
• Creating custom scikit-learn Transformers

Changed jobs

Midway through the year, I decided it was time to shift into a new role with a new company and industry. Where I previously worked with Health Data, the foreseeable future sees me working with Energy Industry Data.

The new role also involves a new tech stack, including Oracle, dbt, and Databricks, and it's an exciting opportunity to learn a ton more stuff.

Completed a funded Machine Learning project

In 2019 I was awarded research funding to develop Machine Learning models that could predict Hospital Admissions from an Emergency Department.

In 2022, I completed, deployed, and integrated these models, which has been one of the highlights of my professional life. Throughout the project, I discovered a substantial amount about the real-world practice of Machine Learning (spoiler alert: it's nothing like the tutorials) and reflected on it in more detail here.

Started an open-source project

Late in 2022, I started work on pbipy, a Python wrapper for the Power BI Rest API. There are plenty of Power BI wrappers out there, but I wanted to combine a few features of other API wrappers I'd used, namely the Jira API wrapper.

The project is also an excuse to learn about package deployment and explore a few more language features in Python.

What's in store for 2023?

Here are a few of the things I'm thinking about for the year:

• Site revamp: I've been quietly re-writing the site from scratch, updating for the latest version of Gatsby, and integrating Tailwind.
• Dark mode
• Virtual Environments in Python
• Data Pipelines with Function Composition
• Ways to improve SQL queries
• Readability in SQL queries
• Visualizing Database Object dependencies with GraphViz
• Explore DuckDB
• dbt

Summing up

2022 was the slowest year for the blog, but despite this, it's still actively maintained, and I continue to enjoy writing (when inspiration strikes).

Thanks for reading in 2022.