IncentiBook: Cookies and Careers

This week has certainly been the most challenging in a while.

In the last week or two, I have managed to implement the Google Maps Distance Matrix into IncentiBook. Who knew putting JavaScript inside PHP could be so much fun?

It is no secret that I am building IncentiBook with less than seven months of web development experience. I think it’s really exciting what can be made with a bit of persistence and Googling.

Of course there are always hurdles, the latest one was certainly more ‘fun’ than the last few. The problem: moving a JavaScript variable to PHP. A number of sources said that this wasn’t possible due to PHP being a server-side language and JavaScript being a browser-side language. It turns out the solution is to create an ajax function and make a cookie to pass the variable…who knew?

That wasn’t this week’s only joy — I interviewed for an entry-level Data Scientist role. Although I am not a data scientist by trade, data analysis is implicit to research and my research career has given me skills to perform this role well.

I am waiting for feedback on the interview, but I think it’s fair to say it went quite poorly (at least compared to how it could have gone). Because I am self-taught in my data analysis and coding, I lack the ability to verbalise what I am doing and the actions I am taking. This makes an interview quite difficult to perform under. I was also expecting to be presenting some ideas for machine learning models, so spent many many hours preparing these, and they were never asked for.

The desire to leave higher education and do something fun and challenging gets stronger every day. An ideal scenario is that I get an upcoming promotion and can then move to four days per week working on IncentiBook…eventually taking it full-time.

On the marketing side, an ‘explainer’ video has been commissioned to put on the website and use in ads. It cost around £75, which I believe to be completely with the money, as my attempt was beyond terrible. Hopefully it will be on the website in the next few days which should help sign-ups.

Either way, the main effort now has to be getting this thing built. I’m still aiming for a beta release in May, but that depends on work and how my girlfriend is coping with pregnancy.

Activities

• Make passing JavaScript to PHP ‘cleaner’.
• Upload the explainer video to IncentiBook.com
• Get some sleep.

Thanks for reading. You can follow IncentiBook on Twitter or Facebook.