Blog

FIRE planner

Built a new dashboard to help you plan financially for your potential FIRE (financial independence retire early). Link to dashboard : https://cheeyeelim.com/apps/fireplanner It takes a few inputs to help you visualize your (+ your partner’s) personal cash flows throughout your lifetime. Besides simple income and expense adjustments, it also simulates housing/mortgage and child-related expenses. Unfortunately,… Continue reading FIRE planner

Infrastructure and framework behind my personal websites

I decided to set up my own website at the end of 2020. 3 years later, I run 2 websites backed by multiple supporting services (see image below), all set up and operated by myself. My goals are (1) to set up a robust infrastructure that can ensure my websites/services are always up, and (2)… Continue reading Infrastructure and framework behind my personal websites

Excel + Office Scripts

If you have worked with Excel automation in the past, you may have painful memories working with complex Excel functions or VBA codes. Recently I realized newer versions of Excel support Office Scripts, which changes my impression of Excel automation completely. Some highlights of Excel + Office Scripts: ✔️ Can be run on the cloud,… Continue reading Excel + Office Scripts

Makefile

A small titbit to share today, the Makefile. A Makefile can be used to define sets of commonly used commands to save time and to ensure the commands run in the correct order with needed pre-requisites. For example, you can define a list of build-related commands under a target called “build”. Then next time you… Continue reading Makefile

Rocket League reinforcement learning-trained bot

As a passionate gamer, I have been reading about the Rocket League Nexto cheat situation with keen interest (https://kotaku.com/rocket-league-machine-learning-cheating-nexto-bot-1849980593). For those unfamiliar with games, Rocket League is a competitive online game where players control cars to play football. Someone has built a bot trained via reinforcement learning, and offered it as a cheating solution to… Continue reading Rocket League reinforcement learning-trained bot

Timeline of LLM

“Classic quant signals might work, but you can’t explain them; ChatGPT might not work, but it can explain itself. In a sense this is the opposite of a classic “black box” machine-learning investment algorithm.” This is an interesting take by Matt Levine, on the ability of ChatGPT to be an asset manager (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-26/chatgpt-is-not-much-of-a-pitch-robot). One of… Continue reading Timeline of LLM

Things they didn’t teach you in software engineering

Whenever you feel disillusioned about the mismatch in promises between what you were taught in university/bootcamp versus what you actually worked on in a job. I recommend reading this article, https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/things-they-didnt-teach-you/. It is written for software engineering, but many points mentioned apply to data science/analytics as well.

Data science solutions – Build vs buy

Many data scientists are working in companies with less advanced technology infrastructure. But these companies still wish to solve their business problems with the help of data science / analytics. At this point usually a question arises, “Should we build or buy a solution to solve this problem with data science?”. As nicely pointed out… Continue reading Data science solutions – Build vs buy

Being a data scientist in consulting

A very accurate and vivid description of being a data scientist in a consulting context. I can definitely say that I have experienced this myself, and it does take a while to get used to presenting comfortably (therefore confidently). But like it or not, the holy grail in data science has always been about connecting… Continue reading Being a data scientist in consulting