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The personal website of Ed Nunes

This website serves as a repository and public display of my writings. Most of my writing tends to be around technology, or the process for making technology. On this site you will find work that is:

  • technical, such as the book I wrote on deploying data engineering infrastructure on GCP,
  • personal, such as my essay on how I switched careers to become technologist, and
  • contemplative, such as my article on learning from failure.

As noted above, this is my personal website. The opinions expressed here are my own.

About Me

For the past seven years data has been a big part of my life. Data has been my livelihood. It’s what I’m thinking about in the shower or on walks with my daughter. It’s what I wade through, organize, investigate, and transform every workday. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I wasn’t supposed to be a technologist. I thought I was supposed to be a fancy lawyer. Or at least, that was my thinking for the early part of my adult life. I spent four years earning a degree in English from UMass Amherst, immediately followed by three years of law school at William & Mary. I got my very nice-looking diplomas framed and started my very short law career.

I had two problems:

  1. Contrary to various advertising materials I may have read, having a law degree from a prestigious school doesn’t result in law firms throwing money at you willy-nilly (at least it didn’t in the depths of the Great Recession).
  2. I didn’t find the practice of law particularly interesting.

So I got myself a law job that didn’t pay particularly well and that I didn’t particularly like. But something great happened at that job. My boss asked if anyone on the team wanted to work on an “Excel project” for a bit and I volunteered. That data task led to more data tasks, until I was doing data analytics full-time.

The easy path for me would have been to stick with my career in law. I’d already spent three years of school, a grueling bar exam, and three years in the industry when I decided that my professional future was in data. And there is no doubt it was challenging to switch careers. It involved a lot of dedication both on the job and outside of it.

My starting point was a single class, Introduction to Programming in C, which I did not expect to ever use in my career. But once I had my mind made up about what I wanted to do I set out to keep leveling myself up: learning Excel, then SQL, then Python, then a million other things, each building on the next. This is one of the things that attracts me the most to my field, the continued opportunity to learn and improve. I continue to be embarrassed when I review work that I did a year or two ago. I just have to remind myself it would be more embarrassing if I looked over old work and didn’t see ways to improve it.

That’s not to say my training in English and law were a waste of time. I count my ability to clearly communicate with my colleagues as one of my best assets, and one that I find is sometimes missing in otherwise fantastic engineers. Analytical thinking is also a big part of Law School training, and it’s surprising how much of that skill set transfers over to thinking about coding challenges. When I was in law school they called it issue spotting, but now that I’m coding it’s called debugging.

I’m grateful that I get to work in a field that I’m passionate about. That I get to continue to learn and grow and be challenged in my career.

If you want to get in touch with me the best way is through LinkedIn.