Me

What

This wiki is a manual collection of job postings related to Data Science and Machine Learning. It is focused more on the region of Canada at the moment, but is also expanding to other countries of interest (to me).

By manual, it means that I simply copy job postings of interest from portals like Linked in, Indeed and so on and then try to format and categorise them.

Why

Here’s the TLDR:

1. To have a list of companies I can readily look up and share, focused on my current or target geographical area and subject(s) of interest.
2. To discover interesting companies and learn more about the kind of work that they do in a proactive manner.
3. To have a portal of information that can be shared with my contacts and others willing to direct me towards better work opportunities, as well as folks looking for more information and direction.
4. Data science/Engineering is a confusing field with a tonne of requirements. These pages will hopefully help me consolidate job requirements more sensibly.

In more detail :

The exercise started with encountering the Data Science Weekly Guide which includes a method to systematically build a profile.

The gist is that, the only tangible source of information with respect to a job is the job posting. As most experienced people know, the profile usually does not match perfectly with the actual job. It is a lot worse for Data science whererin the typical expectation seems to be that of a DataUnicorn?. However, the job profile on an average is still a better approximation than an uneducated, personal guess of the skills and knowledge needed to find a job in Data Science. In the least it reflects the desires of the posting company irrespective of reality.

The Data Science weekly authors talk about collecting job descriptions in a high number and then filtering them out in a binary manner with the question “Do I find this interesting?” with only the information available at hand.

This approach seemed to make a lot of sense to me, especially as I transitioned to data scicence from a different field, and because of the large variety in the career advice that one tends to encounter in practice (which in hindsight is not all that surprising).

Along the way, considering that I was already building an personal, local wiki using Emacs and OrgMode?, I thought it might be cool to post this online, as it could be useful to other folks. In the least, one could possibly analyse the change in job postings and skill requirements over many years.

Backend

This wiki is running on Oddmuse.

Why oddmuse? I find it relatively easy or even pleasurable to use and simple to deploy. I like the general ease of creating and collecting pages with tags and searches in oddmuse. I’ve also tried other wiki systems, but my view is that oddmuse offers a good balance between necessary (and cool!) features and size of code base. (Not that I know any Perl). Well, I just like oddmuse and I can also edit wiki pages from Emacs!

Beyond all this, the EmacsWiki runs on oddmuse ;)

Hat tip to bandali on #emacs for directing me towards Oddmuse. Visit #oddmuse on Libera to talk to kensanata, AlexDaniel and others who created + drive the development of Oddmuse.