Hi, I’m Ben Rasich👋

Back in early 2022, I posted my thoughts after my first semester in the University of Texas Data Science master’s program. Now, almost 2 years on, I’ve just wrapped up my last exam; the only thing left to do is wait for my diploma to show up in the mail and watch the Longhorns win the national championship. Looking back, this was absolutely a worthwhile experience and I’m glad to have taken on the challenge. From the outset, I was hoping this program would prove to be an antidote to imposter syndrome, as well as a sort of creative outlet to try new techniques that weren’t necessarily well-suited to the types of problems I encounter at work. With few exceptions, each course certainly helped in those areas. ...

As I’ve started to use my bike more and more for short commutes and errands, I’ve been noticing the absurdity of how deeply engrained car ownership has become. Cars are silly expensive and, oftentimes, cars are slow. Cars are Expensive Here in Denver, and for the hobbies I pursue, car ownership seems like a necessary evil. It’s the only viable way to get deep into the mountains, especially in the winter, or to the further reaches of the city and suburbs given the rampant urban sprawl. As someone who works from home and loves riding my bike, I should be the perfect candidate for ditching my car. And yet, when it came down to it, I still found it far more “logical” to spend $1,000 on a set of winter tires for my car for the ski season than spending a couple hundred to refurbish my commuter bike that’s served me tirelessly for years and years with zero recurring costs. That skewed sense of logic is car brain talking, so let’s put some actual numbers to it. ...

School is fun* I’m nearing the end of my Data Science masters program at UT Austin this fall, and I find myself looking for what’s next. The most fun part of data science is getting to play around with new, state-of-the-art algorithms, which can continually be at odds with the realities of the workplace. In a business context, there’s a ton of work that goes into test design, data collection, feature engineering, model interpretability, etc. When it’s finally time to train a model, though, the more responsible choice is often to use a standard model from an open source library, maybe do some amount of hyperparameter tuning, get 80% of the benefits in 20% of the time compared to a deeper approach, and move on to the next problem. ...

The winter of 2022 and spring of 2023 have been an absurd time to be on the internet. We’ve seen Twitter acquired by Elon Musk and subsequently run into the ground. At the exact same time, Reddit’s expensive new API pricing (complete with 30-day adoption timeline) and following hostile reaction to community protest among unpaid moderators, place it at the same precipice. I won’t get into the fact that this was inevitable, or that I should have seen it coming, or that it happens to every social platform as it crashes into the need to make money, mainly because others have done a much better job expressing it: ...

The past 6 months have been, without question, the wildest of my adult life. All of it was a lot - packing up my stuff and moving to Denver, school ramping up, work getting crazy - but the one thing that I’m sure will always make me giddy as I look back at this period was the ridiculous stuff I got to be a part of on the bike. ...

After 3 years on the job I’m studying for a Master’s degree in Data Science at UT Austin. Is it going to be worth it? Will it be manageable alongside work and other hobbies? Your guess is as good as mine. How did I get here? The first 3 years of my career leading to my current role as a senior data scientist have been self-taught. I took a job as a business analyst in pursuit of a faster-paced work environment and the greater ownership of complete products that a more digital-focused role allowed over the mechanical engineering field I went to school for. Almost immediately, I found myself surrounded by people working on the types of projects I had previously only experienced in buzzword form - huge machine learning models making predictions using big data, supplying insights to other cloud-hosted microservices. Puttering along at a neighboring desk working on my own projects in excel wasn’t going to cut it for long. ...

I was in middle school when Apple opened the App Store. Having mowed lawns for a summer to save up for an iPod Touch, I thought the next logical step was to make an app myself. I had no idea how to begin, no problem I was looking to solve, and after a few hours fumbling around in xcode, trying to understand what the documentation meant by ‘function argument’ or ‘API’, that project quickly fizzled out. ...

Our team practices a fairly standard separation of responsibilities between Data Science and Engineering. On the data science side, I take in requirements from the business, frame those requirements into a tractable problem, and build a model using all available data. Outside of the model build itself, though, I rely on close partnership with engineers to make data available for me in the production environment and serve up predictions to clients through some sort of production infrastructure. ...

Fall: the leaves are changing, it’s too cold for shorts but not cold enough for skiing, and the sun seemingly sets before it rises. It’s easily near the bottom of my personal list of the top 4 best seasons on earth. What fall does have, though, is a near-perfect lineup of seasonal baked goods. From apple crumb cakes to snickerdoodles, the coalescence of the harvest and weather-induced boredom has given rise to an incredible pantheon of autumnal delicacies. Still, none of them can hold a candle to the one true champion of fall desserts: Pumpkin Pie. ...

Testing out the workflow for blogging with Hugo. It’s a goal of mine to start writing more and documenting my projects. It’s been a real pain trying to find a way to cheaply host a site on my own domain that gives me enough customization to be fun. It seems like this combination of Hugo + Github Pages will be useful, but I’ll have to give it some time. Currently the process is set up as follows: ...