Deciding to Help Out a Friend
Carl and I have been talking about this idea for applied machine learning for analyzing Salesforce.com data, and now that I know what is going to happen to me with the new job, I told him in chat that I'd be glad to build him a proof-of-concept for the task. I know he has test data, and he has the algorithms, and what he needs is something to prove that this will work at scale. Sounds like fun.
I'm not at all sure what the algorithms look like, but it's all in Python code, and he's online so I can ask him as I build this - and I don't have to integrate it with Salesforce.com - I just need to hammer out the code into a decent clojure project that can perform the requested analytics on the data and come up with the "right" answers.
This isn't all that different from the CryptoQuip work I've been doing. I really like this stuff. Clojure makes it so easy to piece stuff together, and with the REPL and all that, it's just amazing how nice it is. So it'll be a nice diversion for a while and then maybe a few weekends and then who knows?